3S2 
 
 i;- :HARLES LAMB 
 
 FLORA- MASSON 
 
 THE- PEOPLE S B OOKS 
 
 Ill iMiaiiiiMiiiiiiMiiMiiiMMWHiiiiiiiMWMM^ iiiihiiiiiiiihimii -ir I -^ 
 

Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/charleslambOOmassrich 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 By flora MASSON 
 
 LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK 
 67 LONG ACRE, W.C., AND EDINBURGH 
 NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. THE FAMILY IN CROWN OFFICE ROW 
 
 n. THE OLD BLUE-COAT SCHOOL 
 
 III. A boy's DREAM . 
 
 IV. AN AWAKENING 
 V. THE MIGHTY DEBT 
 
 VI. IMMORTAL FRIENDSHIPS 
 Vn. "ROSAMUND GRAY " 
 Vin. POVERTY AND POPULARITY . 
 IX. " BY CHARLES AND MARY LAMB 
 X. THE " LONDON MAGAZINE " . 
 XI. A SUPERANNUATED MAN 
 Xn. PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN 
 XIII. " elij aJ' .... 
 
 CHRONOLOGY 
 ^ REFERENCE BOOKS 
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 5 
 9 
 14 
 19 
 25 
 33 
 38 
 44 
 53 
 63 
 69 
 76 
 84 
 90 
 91 
 92 
 
 263217 
 
 iii 
 
CHARLES LAMB 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE FAMILY n» CROWK OFFICE BOW 
 
 Ik 1775, Mr. Samuel Salt, a middle-aged barrister — 
 afterwards a bencher of the Iimer Temple — ^was Uving 
 in London, in chambers in Crown Office Row, a row of 
 buildings facing the Temple Gardens and the river. 
 
 Mr. Salt was hving in considerable comfort and 
 dignity. It was a double set of chambers, a "sub- 
 stantial house," in fact ; and Mr. Salt " kept his car- 
 riage " and two indoor servants, besides a trusted cleA 
 and factotum, John Lamb, a mamed man, who had 
 been in his service for many years. Mrs. Lamb acted 
 as Mr. Salt's housekeeper ; and the couple, with their 
 family of children and a sister of John Lamb's, who 
 had made her home with them, must have fully 
 occupied the ground-floor rooms of Mr. Salt's estabfah- 
 ment. 
 
 There could have been no stipulations about *' en- 
 cumbrances " : the baptisms of seven Httle Lambs are 
 to be found in the registers of the Temple Church, thou^ 
 of the seven, Mr. and Mrs. Lamb succeeded in rearing 
 only three — John, Mary Anne, and Charles. John, the 
 eldest, was twelve, and Mary ten, years old, when Charles 
 Lamb, the youngest of the family, " a weakly bat very 
 pretty babe," was bom in the house in Crown Office 
 Row — in one of the back, ^x)und-floor rooms ^diich 
 looked into Inner Temple Lane — ^Feb. 10, 1775. 
 
 Not much is known about Charles Lamb's parenftB 
 
6 ;' . . 'CHARLES LAMB 
 
 ]ftef9^ i^^ dsby^ khexi lihey were living in Crown Office 
 Row as clerk and housekeeper to Mr. Samuel Salt. 
 Charles Lamb's father, John Lamb, was a Lincolnshire 
 boy, who had come up to London at the age of fifteen 
 to make his start in life in the smart new livery of a 
 gentleman's servant. He had pushed his way up in 
 the world to be confidential servant and barrister's 
 clerk, and had married, rather late in life, Elizabeth 
 Field, a woman a good deal younger than himself. She 
 was a native of Ware, in Hertfordshire, and the daughter 
 of a certain dignified Mrs. Field, who was for more than 
 fifty years housekeeper to the Plumer family, at their 
 fine old mansion of Blakesware, near to the village of 
 Widford. Mrs. Lamb was a tall, handsome woman ; 
 placid, somewhat prosaic and matter-of-fact, and 
 gentle-mannered beyond her station. So tall and 
 handsome was she that their London friends used to say 
 she " might be taken for a sister of Mrs. Siddons " ; 
 whereas her husband, John Lamb, was a httle fellow — 
 '' the liveliest Httle fellow breathing " — ^with " a face as 
 gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble." ^ 
 
 Charles Lamb has described his father, the lawyer's 
 clerk, under the name of Lovel, in his Essay on " The Old 
 Benchers of the Inner Temple " : 
 
 " I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible 
 and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and ' would 
 strike.' In the cause of the oppressed he never con- 
 sidered inequalities, or calculated the number of his 
 opponents. He once wrested a sword out of the hand 
 of a man of quality that had drawn upon him, and 
 pommelled him severely with the hilt of it. The swords- 
 man had offered insult to a female — ^an occasion against 
 which no odds against him could have prevented the 
 interference of Lovel. He would stand next day bare- 
 
 * There is a portrait of John Lamb in Procter's Memoir of 
 Charles Lamb which confirms this statement. 
 
THE FAMILY IN CROWN OFFICE ROW 7 
 
 headed to the same person modestly to excuse his inter- 
 ference — for L. never forgot rank where something 
 better was not concerned." 
 
 John Lamb had " a fine turn for humorous poetry." 
 He could " mould heads " in plaster of Paris, could 
 "turn cribbage-boards," take a hand at quadrille or 
 bowls ; and he made punch " better than any man of 
 his degree in England." He had " the merriest quips 
 and conceits, and was altogether as brimful of rogueries 
 and inventions as you could desire." Little wonder 
 that such a servant had become indispensable to Mr. 
 Samuel Salt, the kindest and most easy-going of masters. 
 
 John Lamb was at once " his clerk, his good servant, 
 his dresser, his friend, his ' flapper,' his guide, stop- 
 watch, auditor, treasurer." Mr. Salt apparently did 
 nothing without consulting John Lamb, " nor failed in 
 anything without expecting and fearing his admonish- 
 ing " : 
 
 " He put himself almost too much in his hands, had 
 they not been the purest in the world. He resigned 
 his title almost to respect as a master, if L. could 
 ever have forgotten for a moment that he was a 
 servant." 
 
 And so it was that John Lamb and his wife Ehzabeth, 
 and old "Aunt Hetty," and the children, all lived in 
 Mr. Salt's house in Crown Office Row, with almost as 
 much sense of possession as if it had really belonged to 
 them. And so it was that the Temple was the wonder- 
 ful nursery of Charles Lamb ; — ^that little world lying 
 back from the noise and bustle of Fleet Street and the 
 Strand, lapped by the waters of the Thames ; the Temple 
 of the end of the eighteenth century ; the Temple of Dr. 
 Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, with all its still older 
 centuries of splendid association shut within its gates. 
 The Temple ! — " its church, its halls, its gardens, its 
 fountains, its river, I had almost said — ^for, in those 
 
8 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a 
 stream that watered our pleasant places ? . . ." 
 
 Here, as a httle fellow, he took his first surveys of 
 life — ^usually holding his sister Mary's hand. Here he 
 learned the trick of making the water of a certain 
 fountain rise and fall, as if by magic, to the wonderment 
 of other young urchins, as small as himself, but not so 
 clever. Here he gazed up at the winged horse, and 
 the frescoes of the Virtues — his " first hint of allegory." 
 Here he spelt out the " moral inscriptions " on a sun- 
 dial, and watched the dark fine steahng so imper- 
 ceptibly over its disc that never, never could even " the 
 eye of childhood " detect its movement ! 
 
 The brother and sister must have stood, in the gloom 
 of the Temple Church, beside those dead, recumbent, 
 silent-speaking giants ; and it was in the Temple, 
 among the epitaphs, Hstening to the stately eulogies of 
 the faultless dead, that the child looked up and asked 
 the question, so characteristic of the '' Elia " of later 
 days — " But where do the naughty people lie ? " 
 
 And they often watched, from a safe distance, the 
 old benchers, the giants of their own day, — the " fine 
 face and person " of Samuel Salt himself among them — 
 pacing the terrace, two and two, with " footsteps 
 which made its pavement awful " ; walking and talking, 
 " with both hands folded behind them for state, or one 
 hand at least behind, the other carrying a cane." 
 
 " The old benchers had it almost sacred to themselves, 
 in the forepart of the day at least. They might not be 
 sided or jostled. Their air and dress asserted the parade." 
 
 The children had always thought of their father's 
 master as an old bachelor ; and it was not till many 
 years later, when master and servant were both dead, 
 that Charles Lamb learnt the little romance of Samuel 
 Salt's fife, — the one year of wedded happiness, long 
 
THE OLD BLUE-COAT SCHOOL 9 
 
 ago ; the lady lost in childbed ; the deep melancholy 
 that followed, and from which the childless widower 
 never thoroughly recovered. It explained much ; 
 it explained that *' pensive gentility," that indolence 
 of habit ; the fact that Mr. Salt never laughed and 
 never " trifled, or talked gallantly," or in fact paid even 
 the most ordinary attention to the ladies, more than one 
 of whom (but one especially, a sister of a colleague who 
 paced the terrace) had " unravelled into beauty certain 
 pecuHarities of this very shy and retiring character." 
 
 And so, while the children always thought of Mr. 
 Samuel Salt as an old bachelor, Mr. Samuel Salt did not 
 object to the patter of Httle feet in the house in Crown 
 Office Row, and was indeed to prove a kind friend and 
 benefactor to John Lamb and his family. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE OLD BLUE-COAT SCHOOL 
 
 Just opposite to the Fleet Street entrance to the Temple 
 is Fetter Lane, leading from Fleet Street into Holbom ; 
 and in Fetter Lane there was in those days, and for 
 many a year afterwards, a school kept by a Mr. William 
 Bird. It was a humble day-school, to which, how- 
 ever, a good many of the famiUes of this neighbourhood 
 sent their children to learn reading, writing, and arith- 
 metic — ^the boys being taught in the morning, and the 
 girls in the afternoon. The schoolroom looked into *' a 
 discoloured, dingy garden in the passage leading from 
 Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings " ; and there Mr. 
 Bird was for a time assisted by a very nervous young 
 usher of the name of Starkey, who was woefully tormented 
 by the pupils, and especially by some of the elder girls 
 of the evening class. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Lamb sent at least two of their children — 
 
10 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 Mary and Charles — to this school ; and Mary Lamb was 
 one of Starkey's pupils. But, by the time Charles was 
 old enough to go to school, the hapless Starkey had 
 been succeeded by a nephew of Mr. Bird's, a young 
 man who afterwards graced the boards of Drury Lane 
 Theatre ; and Mr. Bird himself hovered over the class- 
 room, " ferule " in hand, clad in " one of those flowered 
 Lidian gowns formerly in use with schoolmasters, the 
 strange figures upon which we used to interpret into 
 hieroglyphics of fear and suffering." ^ 
 
 For a short time, Charles Lamb was one of the httle 
 boys who sat elbowing each other, with legs wedged 
 into the uncomfortable sloping desks, and fingers inky 
 by much dipping into the Httle leaden ink-pots, " not 
 separately subsisting, but sunk into the desks." With 
 many sidelong looks into the dingy garden, he traced 
 his first pot-hooks and hangers, and wrote his first 
 copy, " Art improves Nature." And he was there long 
 enough to gain a prize for spelling, — ^which he knew 
 enough to know was wholly undeserved. 
 
 And then, in October 1782, Mr. Yeates, one of the 
 governors of Christ's Hospital, a friend of Mr. Samuel 
 Salt's, presented Charles Lamb to the foundation of 
 that charity : " The son of John Lamb, scrivener, and 
 Ehzabeth, his wife." In his eighth year, a little delicate, 
 sensitive fellow, with a stutter (he had nearly died of the 
 smallpox when he was five years old) Charles Lamb was 
 put into the dark-blue gown and red leather girdle and 
 canary-yellow stockings of the Blue-coat School boy, 
 and was turned about to be admired by the family in 
 Crown Office Row — especially by Mary, who was now 
 eighteen, and had nursed him through the smallpox, 
 and by old Aunt Hetty, who used to say that this boy 
 was " the only thing in the world she loved." 
 
 Christ's Hospital, founded by Edward VI, has, after 
 ^ Captain Starkey ^ by Charles Lamb. 
 
THE OLD BLUE-COAT SCHOOL 11 
 
 more than three centuries of existence in the very heart 
 of the great city, been removed from its old site in 
 Newgate Street, into fresher air and healthier surround- 
 ings. Never again, in Newgate Street, will the Blue- 
 coat boys be seen playing in that old yard behind the 
 railings — ^the bare heads, the long blue skirts tucked up, 
 and the little yellow legs. No doubt they are much 
 healthier and happier where they now are. And yet, 
 in spite of the old rough ways of the old Blue-coat 
 School — its pageantries and its punishments — ^handed 
 down from the days of Henry VIII and still persisting 
 at the end of the eighteenth century, those seven years 
 that Charles Lamb passed at Christ's Hospital were, on 
 the whole, very happy years.^ 
 
 Boyer — the Rev. James Boyer — ^was the very severe 
 upper master of that day : the classics and coarse 
 food and small beer and the birch loomed largely in 
 the school routine. The dungeons, " httle Bedlam 
 cells," were still in use, and the scourge, peni- 
 tential dress, and fetters for the wrists of small 
 runaways. And Boyer's two wigs played an awful 
 part in the children's lives — the dress-wig, smooth and 
 powdered, and the " passionate wig," that Boyer put 
 on when he meant business. 
 
 But for some reason, not fully explained, the ultra- 
 Spartan discipHne of the Blue -coat School was re- 
 laxed for Httle Charles Lamb. One would like to think 
 it might have been the extreme smallness of the yellow 
 legs — ^legs " almost immaterial " even in his later days — 
 taken in conjunction with the extreme beauty of shape 
 of the young dark head and the sweetness of a deHcate 
 child's smile, that gained for him those pecuHar ad- 
 vantages which he certainly did enjoy. But it was 
 more probably the fact that his father's master was Mr. 
 Samuel Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, close at 
 
 1 " Christ's Hospital " {Essays of Mia). 
 
12 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 hand— a personal friend of his " govemour's " ; and that 
 Mr. Randal Norris, the sub-treasurer of the Inner 
 Temple, happened to be very fond of Httle Charles Lamb. 
 The boy was allowed to go home '' almost as often as 
 he wished " ; and in a few minutes — running from the 
 comer of Newgate Street — ^he could be back in the house 
 in Crown Office Row, or in the Temple Gardens, mani- 
 pulating that fountain. He had his tea and hot rolls 
 every morning, while the other boys " battened " on 
 dry bread and small beer, poured into wooden piggins 
 out of a leather black-jack. The " paternal kitchen " 
 was allowed to furnish him with hot plates of roast veal ; 
 and old Aunt Hetty would come toddling across, with 
 a basin under her apron, " squatting down upon some 
 odd stone in a by-nook of the cloisters " till the Httle 
 fellow could come and eat — ^with what feelings ! 
 
 " There was love for the bringer ; shame for the 
 thing brought, and the manner of its bringing ; sym- 
 pathy for those who were too many to share in it — and, 
 at the top of all, hunger ! . . ." 
 
 Very different was this from poor Coleridge's ex- 
 perience, when he was crying, the first day of his return 
 after the hohdays : 
 
 " ' Boy ! ' I remember Boyer saying to me. . . . ' Boy ! 
 the school is your father ! Boy ! the school is your 
 mother ! Boy ! the school is your brother ! the school 
 is your sister ! the school is your first cousiu, and your 
 second cousin, and all the rest of your relations ! Let's 
 have no more crjang.' " ^ 
 
 On haK-holidays, the Blue-coat boys wandered about 
 the city, gazing into shop-windows, or presented them- 
 selves, time after time, to look at the Hons in the Tower, 
 to which they had access, " by courtesy immemorial." 
 And in the summer they bathed together in the New 
 River, where they wantoned " hke young dace in the 
 1 Coleridge's Table TaUsu 
 
THE OLD BLUE-COAT SCHOOL lb 
 
 streams." After all, it was the sense of companionship, 
 quite as much as the '' hot-loaf of the Temple," that 
 made Charles Lamb so happy at the Blue-coat School. 
 
 I " I have had playmates, I have had companions, 
 
 In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays " 
 
 George Dyer, the absent-minded, was one of these; 
 though he was already a '' Grecian " when Lamb and 
 Coleridge entered Christ's Hospital in 1782 ; and there 
 i were the two brothers Le Grrice from Cornwall, who 
 i became " Grecians '* also — Charles Le Grice, the clergy- 
 i man, and Sam Le Grice, the affectionate ** mad wag," 
 i who begged a commission of the Duke of Wellington — 
 I and got it. There was Jem White, " whose passion was 
 , for Shakespeare " ; " my pleasant friend, Jem White," 
 who afterwards gave the hot suppers to the httle London 
 chinmey-sweeps.^ But chief of all Charles Lamb's 
 friends and comrades, the " companion of his serious 
 thoughts" at school and afterwards, was the friend- 
 less boy from the Devonshire rectory — Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge. 
 
 Charles Lamb was never more than " deputy-Grecian " 
 f at Christ's Hospital. He did not come under Boyer's 
 j tutelage till towards the end of his schooldays ; and the 
 J Rev. Matthew Field, the under master, was a much 
 ; gentler type of person, who never used the rod, and only 
 flicked with the cane, and was not to be compared, as a 
 teacher, with the passionate Boyer. But when Charles 
 I Lamb left school in November 1789, in his fifteenth year, 
 I he had read Virgil, Sallust, Terence, Lucian, and Xeno- 
 I phon, and was rather an adept at Latin composition. 
 i He saw his friends go on, as " Grecians," with exhibi- 
 i tions to Oxford and to Cambridge : Charles Lamb was 
 ! to know these pleasant places only " in the vacation." 
 I It may have been his stammer that prevented all thought 
 I of the Church, and therefore of the Universities ; or 
 ^ " In Praise of Chimney-sweeps " {Essays of Elia). 
 
Ly 
 
 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 a.y have been other, family, reasons to keep him 
 /home. At fifteen, he had left the Blue-coat 
 I and was Hving once more with his family in 
 Crown Ofiice Row ; and not long afterwards he ob- 
 tained a situation in the South Sea House, in Thread- 
 needle Street, of which Mr. Samuel Salt was a deputy- 
 governor, and where Charles Lamb's elder brother, 
 John, was already employed as a clerk. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 A boy's dream 
 
 Charles Lamb may have looked back on the Temple 
 as his splendid nursery, and the old Blue-coat School 
 as the scene of his "joyful schooldays"; it was in 
 Hertfordshire that the golden hours of youth were 
 lived, to be remembered through a haze of sunshine 
 and tears : 
 
 "... the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire." 
 
 The children were accustomed to spend their summer 
 holidays with their Hertfordshire relations — the Glad- 
 mans, at the farmhouse of Mackery End, near Wheat- 
 hampstead, and their grandmother Field, in the old 
 dower-house of Blakesware. Mary Lamb, in one of 
 her stories for children,^ has described the intense 
 happiness of the city-child of those old, pre-railway 
 days, when, having fallen asleep on the journey, it 
 woke to see " green fields on both sides of the chaise," 
 and found itself " in the country," set down amid all 
 the simple activities and jubilations of the farmyard, 
 the vegetable-garden, and the orchard : " Oh, what a 
 sweet place grandmama's orchard is ! " 
 
 Fleet Street and the Strand — the sundial and the 
 ^ " The Young Mahometan " in Mrs, Leicester's School. 
 
A BOY'S DREAM 15 
 
 fountain of the Temple — were forgotten in the fascinat- 
 ing occupation of searching for eggs among the nettles, 
 *' round by the orchard hedge." ..." If we could find 
 eggs and violets too, what happy children we were ! " 
 
 All days were holidays, yet every day had its lessons. 
 They were not exactly the lessons of Fetter Lane — 
 those inky reiterations of " Art improves Nature." In 
 Hertfordshire, all knowledge was useful knowledge ; im- 
 parted, on the return to Crown Office Row, in unfor- 
 gettable words : 
 
 " Grandmama says a hen is not esteemed a very 
 wise bird." 
 
 But it was the old mansion of Blakesware itself that 
 made the deepest impression on the minds of these 
 fanciful children. They had been accustomed to " snug 
 firesides ; the low-built roof ; parlours ten feet by ten." 
 At Blakesware — ^it was the dower-house of the Plumer 
 family, and they did not often live there — the children 
 found themselves in " peopled sohtudes," surrounded 
 by " the traces of the splendour of past inmates." Mary 
 Lamb, in after fife, remembered the toys of dead Httle 
 ones ; the tarnished, gilded battledore, and the shuttle- 
 cocks bereft of feathers ; and the Httle marble satyr in 
 the hall, on whose shoulder, every day in passing, she 
 laid her hand "to feel how cold he was." In an old 
 locked-up room, full of books, she had pored over a 
 tattered volume, Mahometanism Explained; a "very 
 improper book, for it contained a false history of Abraham 
 and his descendants " ; and it had taken an extra- 
 ordinary hold on what her grandmother used to call 
 "those poor, crazy, moythered brains of yours." The 
 glamour of the East had filled that old book-room : in 
 solitude and all child-seriousness, she embraced the 
 Faith, and went about among the eggs and violets — and 
 the nettles — in deadly fear of coming to the narrow 
 bridge, no wider than a silken thread, on one side of 
 
 B 
 
16 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 which all the people who were not Mahometans (and 
 nobody in Crown Office Row was a Mahometan !) 
 would shp, and drop " into the tremendous gulf that 
 had no bottom." 
 
 Charles Lamb, as a little fellow, knew every nook 
 and corner of the old house, and " wondered and wor- 
 shipped everywhere." He never forgot its marble hall, 
 and the medallions of the twelve Csesars ; nor the 
 tapestried bedrooms, " all Ovid on the walls " ; nor the 
 family portraits, the pleasure-grounds, and the " triple 
 terraces." The romance and beauty of this place— this 
 Enghsh home — ^possessed him : it became a part of 
 himself. What did it matter that the dear old grand- 
 mother was not exactly the mistress of the place, but 
 only had honourable charge of it ? — He had made it his 
 own : 
 
 '' To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary 
 to have been bom gentle." 
 
 The very portraits of those other people's ancestors 
 seemed to smile at him, " reaching forward from the 
 canvas, to recognise the new relationship." He felt 
 that Blakesware belonged to him — Charles Lamb. 
 And to-day most people will feel this too ; for the old 
 house has long since been levelled to the ground, and is 
 vanished for ever ; but the Essay of Elia remains.^ 
 
 The grandmother seems to have been always ready 
 to receive her London daughter's children : Charles 
 Lamb must have been often with her at Blakesware — 
 as a little deUcate child, as a Blue-coat School boy, and 
 as a young city clerk. If we are to beheve the veiled 
 autobiography of the Essays, he must have been still at 
 the Blue-coat School, a " deputy-Grecian," reading and 
 talking poetry with his friend Coleridge, when, during 
 one of those summer holidays at Blakesware, he came 
 under the spell of the " fair-hair'd maid." 
 ^ " Blakesmoor, in Hertfordshire." 
 
A BOY'S DREAM 17 
 
 "... For seven long years, in hope sometimes, 
 sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever. . . ." ^ 
 
 Something — not much — is known of the identity of 
 
 this Hertfordshire girl, the "Alice W " of the 
 
 Essays, the " Anna " of his earliest sonnets. She was 
 living with her mother in a cottage in the village of 
 Widford, and her real name was Ann Simmons. The 
 boy and girl must have been a good deal together in 
 those successive summers, in the " winding wood-walks " 
 about Widford and Blakesware : 
 
 " Green winding walks, and shady pathways sweet." 
 
 And, as often as he could, Charles Lamb must have turned 
 his back on the city and the South Sea House, and come 
 knocking at the door of that particular one of a group of 
 cottages in Widford village : 
 
 " . . . The little cottage which she loved, 
 The cottage which did once my all contain." 
 
 It was a boy's dream ; but it was not to be. There 
 was to come a day when the cottage-door remained shut 
 and the wood- walks were left empty 
 
 " I loved a love once, fairest among women. 
 Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her ^^ 
 
 The reasons why—for they were several — must un- 
 fold themselves in a later chapter of Charles Lamb's 
 hfe. Meantime, he was going daily to his work in the 
 melancholy-looking house in Threadneedle Street, where 
 his elder brother, John — twelve years older than him- 
 self — had been already some years a clerk, and was 
 now Hving, in chambers of his own, a rather selfish 
 bachelor existence. The elder brother does not seem 
 to have troubled himself much about his family : what 
 he earned, he spent on himself ; though for the last 
 few years the hands of the clock had not stood still in 
 1 ** Dream-Children" {Essays of Mia), 
 
18 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 the house in Crown Office Row. His father had been 
 in Mr. Salt's service for more than forty years : master 
 and servant alike were growing old. 
 
 In 1786, before Charles Lamb left the Blue-coat 
 School, Mr. Salt had been ill, and had been nursed in 
 his illness, with much care and attention, by Mrs. Lamb. 
 During, or after, this illness, Mr. Salt had made his will, 
 in which he left to his old servant, John Lamb, now 
 almost past work, £500 in South Sea stock ; and to 
 Mrs. Lamb, " well deserved for her care and attention 
 during my illness," he left £100, increased by a later 
 codicil to £200 — ^which may have meant that Mr. Salt 
 had again been ill, and again been nursed by Mrs. 
 Lamb. And the kind old bencher, anxious to go on 
 helping his old servant even after his own death, had 
 directed his executors to employ John Lamb in collect- 
 ing certain " exchequer annuities," and to pay him 
 £10 a year so long as he should continue to do so. 
 
 Li 1792 — the last year of his life — Mr. Salt obtained 
 for Charles Lamb, the younger son, then seventeen, a 
 better appointment than the one he was holding in the 
 South Sea House. This was a clerkship in the ac- 
 countant's office of the East India House, with a salary 
 beginning at £70. It was Samuel Salt's last act of 
 kindness to the family of his old servant. He died in 
 1792 ; and Charles Lamb, a boy of seventeen, earning 
 £70 a year, found himself in the important position of 
 chief bread-winner of the little family. And the old 
 bencher dead, the old house in Crown Office Row was 
 to be dismantled : John Lamb and his family must 
 find a lodging elsewhere. 
 
 It must have been a sad day for Charles and Mary 
 — Mary, who at twenty-seven was earning what she 
 could, after the manner of her time, " by her needle " — 
 when they watched Mr. Samuel Salt's books, that 
 " spacious closet of good old English reading," to which 
 
AN AWAKENING 19 
 
 they had both had such generous access all those happy- 
 years, dispersed and packed and carted away. 
 
 Somebody else was very sad too — poor Miss Susannah 
 Pierson, who for forty years had cherished a hopeless 
 passion for Samuel Salt ; a passion which nothing — not 
 even the "long-resolved yet gently-enforced puttings-off 
 of unrelenting bachelorhood " — could extinguish or abate. 
 
 The solitary lady was seen walking up and down 
 Bedford Row, " in the cold evening-time," weeping big 
 tears, " because her friend had died that day." And 
 her friend, who had died that day, had requited the 
 forty years of hopeless devotion by leaving Miss Susannah 
 Pierson, in his very last codicil, " some tokens of his 
 regard " — £500, his own particular silver ink-stand, 
 which had never supplied the ink for the love-letter she 
 would so infinitely have preferred, and some of his 
 beloved books ; his Pope, Swift, Shakespeare, Addison, 
 and Steele, with Sherlocke's Sermons and any other 
 volumes she might Hke to select out of his library ; 
 hoping that " by reading and reflection " they would 
 '' make her life more comfortable." 
 
 Perhaps they did — even if she never opened them. 
 
 CHAPTER I\ 
 
 AN AWAKENING 
 
 It is not known where the Lamb family were housed 
 after they left Crown Office Row ; but four years later, 
 in 1796, they were all Uving in lodgings in Little Queen 
 Street, Holbom — Mr. and Mrs. Lamb, Aunt Hetty, 
 Mary, and Charles. 
 
 The four years had been rather a chapter of mis- 
 fortunes ; not so much on account of poverty, for, 
 putting all their Httle means together, they had enough 
 to live upon. But the mother had been ill, and the father's 
 
20 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 mind was failing ; and old Aunt Hetty was fit for 
 nothing but to sit with a " good book " on her lap, 
 mumbling softly to herself. It was on Mary that the 
 cares of the little family devolved, and the burdens of 
 life fell heaviest. 
 
 Mary's education had been neglected since the days 
 of Starkey's tuition in Fetter Lane ; but for some years 
 she had earned her living " by her needle," taking in 
 work at home ; and now, with her mother, father, and 
 aunt dependent on her for their comforts by night and 
 day, she had taken a little apprentice girl to help her 
 with the needlework. Of their three children, Mary — 
 the most devoted and dutiful of all — had always been 
 the one to cause the parents, and especially the placid 
 Hertfordshire mother, anxiety. They knew there was 
 a history of insanity on the father's side of the family, 
 and that all their children were more or less nervous 
 and excitable. John, the " dear little selfish, craving 
 John " of their first married years, had developed into 
 the big, genial, selfish John of the South Sea House ; a 
 young man of " jolly, handsome presence," but an 
 egoist, and morbidly sensitive about pain — ^unable to 
 bear even the sight of physical suffering. Charles, the 
 " weakly but very pretty babe," had always been a 
 highly-strung, nervous boy, with a stammer ; and as 
 for Mary, they could not but remember how she, as a 
 child, had come home from Blakesware with her little 
 '' moythered " brains filled with Mahometanism ; how, 
 unknown to anybody, she had worked herself up into a 
 fever of apprehension, and in the middle of one night 
 had awakened her placid mother out of a sound sleep, 
 to beg her to " 6e so kind as to become a Mahometan,''^ 
 On that occasion, Mrs. Lamb had very sensibly sent for 
 the doctor ; and, by Mary's own account, the doctor 
 and his kind wife had fetched her away in their carriage 
 to their own house, and there watched and humoured 
 
AN AWAKENING ' 21 
 
 and soothed her back to healthy childhood. But Mary 
 had been subject all her life to fits of nervous de- 
 pression ; and at times, when she was overworked and 
 overwrought, "worn down to a state of nervous 
 misery," passing Bethlehem Hospital (the " Bedlam " 
 of that day) she would wonder drearily if she were not 
 fated to end her days there. 
 
 It was different, during those four years, for Charles. 
 He was at least able to set out every morning regularly 
 for the East India House. For him, winter and summer, 
 there was the morning walk through the city, by Cheap- 
 side and Comhill — ^the bells of St. Paul's ringing — to 
 the great house in Leadenhall Street, and his own 
 particular desk and stool. There were the other clerks ; 
 the big ledgers — even indigo had its romance in those 
 first days ; and, hidden away in his desk, he could keep 
 the Httle bits of excessively untidy manuscript — his 
 mild imitations of Bowles, and a boy's rhapsody about 
 the *' shivering joys " imparted by the tones of Mrs. 
 Siddons's voice. He was always touching up his Httle 
 sonnets, hoarding them to show to Coleridge. For 
 Coleridge, in those years, had been hving through his 
 own period of storm and stress ; his Cambridge days, 
 and love-episodes, and barracks entr^acte ; his panti- 
 socracy dream, and his friendship and quarrel with 
 Southey ; and he was now married to Sara Fricker, and 
 living in a country cottage ; and Charles Lamb, in his 
 letters, was sending little postscript messages to " Sara," 
 who wrote httle poems too. But whenever, during those 
 years, Coleridge happened to be in London, he and Charles 
 had met in the sanded parlour of the " Salutation and 
 Cat" in Newgate Street — close to the Old Blue-coat 
 School — ^where they spent glorious evenings together : 
 
 "... The httle smoky room at the * Salutation and 
 Cat,' where we have sat together through the winter 
 nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy." 
 
22 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 And when Coleridge was not in London, Charles could 
 write to him ; wonderful boy letters they were ; rich 
 in feeling, full of poetry-making and laughter and tears. 
 And sometimes, after office hours, there would be the 
 pit of the theatre, which was always close at hand ; 
 the London playhouse of the close of the eighteenth 
 century : 
 
 " Even so, thou, Siddons, meltest my sad heart." 
 
 In their palmier days, the Lamb family had been 
 great theatre-goers. At the tender age of six, Charles 
 Lamb had been taken by the " elder folks " to his first 
 play, and had stood outside the pit entrance of the 
 Old Drury, " Garrick's Drury," and hstened, never to 
 forget, to the cry of the " theatrical fruiteresses " : 
 
 " Chase ^ some oranges, chase some numparels,^ chase 
 a biU of the play ! " 
 
 To the last hour of his life, Charles Lamb was never 
 to feel anything in drama as he felt that first play : 
 
 " Once the bell sounded. It was to ring out yet 
 once again — ^and, incapable of the anticipation, I re- 
 posed my shut eyes in a sort of resignation upon the 
 maternal lap. It rang the second time. The curtain 
 drew up — ^I was not past six years old, and the play 
 was Artaxerxes ! " ^ 
 
 And now he went to the play by himself ; for he was 
 twenty — and in love. Not with Mrs. Siddons, though 
 her voice had thrilled him through and through, " melt- 
 ing his sad heart " ; not with anybody within the pre- 
 cincts of " Garrick's Drury " ; but with a girl with blue 
 eyes and " the bright yellow Hertfordshire hair," with 
 whom he had wandered in Hertfordshire lanes. 
 
 The grandmother Field was no longer at Blakesware : 
 she had died in the same year as Mr. Samuel Salt, and 
 was buried in Widford Churchyard. Old Blakesware 
 
 1 Choose. 2 Nonpareils. ^ <« My First Play " (Assays o/ JS'^ia). 
 
AN AWAKENING 28 
 
 House was closed to Charles Lamb ; and it is possible 
 that Ann Simmons too may have moved away from 
 the little village. But there is reason to believe that 
 Charles Lamb, weighted as he was by family cares, 
 was still pressing his suit, " in hope sometimes, sometimes 
 in despair," when, in the winter of 1795, something 
 must have happened to bring him up sharply against 
 the inevitable, and make the sensitive young brain reel. 
 A few months later, he wrote to Coleridge : 
 
 " My hfe has been somewhat diversified of late. 
 The six weeks that finished last year and began this, 
 your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a 
 madhouse, at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational 
 now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was; and 
 many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough 
 to make a volume, if all were told. . . . Coleridge, it 
 may convince you of my regards for you when I tell you 
 my head ran on you in my madness, as much almost 
 as on another person, who I am inclined to think was 
 the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy." 
 
 There was to be no recurrence of this attack. The 
 " tide of melancholy " was to rush on him sometimes, 
 leaving a *' stupor that makes me indifferent to the 
 hopes and fears of this hfe " ; but he was never to know, 
 for himself at least, the inside of the prison-house 
 again. In his whimsical manner, he told Coleridge that 
 he sometimes looked back at the time spent in Hoxton 
 Asylum " with a gloomy kind of envy " ; for, while it 
 lasted, he " had many, many hours of pure happiness." 
 
 " Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the 
 grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad ! " 
 
 This was in June 1796. Mary had known all about 
 Ann Simmons, and poor Charles's hopeless attachment ; 
 and she had been very tender with the young brother, 
 ** sore galled with disappointed hope." She had been 
 half mother, half sister to him, ever since the days of the 
 
24 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 Temple Gardens, when he was a very Httle fellow, holding 
 on to her hand. He showed her the sonnets to Anna : 
 
 "... Oh Anna, mild-eyed maid ! 
 Beloved ! '' 
 
 And of course Mary thought them absolutely perfect. 
 What could be more beautiful ? 
 
 "... And does the lonely glade 
 Still court the footsteps of the fair-hair'd maid ? 
 Still in her locks the gales of summer sigh ? 
 While I forlorn do wander, reckless where, 
 And 'mid my wanderings meet no Anna there." 
 
 The sister had done all she could to comfort a boy's 
 care-crazed mind ; and when the poor boy was shut 
 up in Hoxton Asylum, he wrote, in a " lucid interval," 
 a little sonnet to Mary — ^a sad httle sonnet (for he had 
 evidently been cross and irritable to her), beginning — 
 
 " If from my lips some angry accents fell, 
 Peevish complaint or harsh reproof unkind," 
 
 and ending — 
 
 "... Thou to me didst ever show 
 Kindest affection ; and would oft-times lend 
 An ear to the desponding love-sick lay, 
 Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay 
 But ill the mighty debt of love I owe, 
 Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend." 
 
 He did not know, when he was writing this, how soon 
 he was to be called upon to repay that mighty debt. 
 And, in the meantime, the event of the moment to the 
 convalescent boy and to the sympathetic Mary must 
 have been the appearance, in the spring of 1796, 
 of Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects, pubhshed 
 by Coleridge's friend and admirer, Cottle of Bristol. 
 For the volume contained, not only the poems by 
 Coleridge, which Charles had already criticised and 
 enthused over in many letters to his friend, but also 
 four of his own sonnets — sonnets about Anna and 
 Hertfordshire, and the sonnet to Mrs. Siddons, which 
 
THE MIGHTY DEBT 25 
 
 had appeared so long previously as 1794 in the columns 
 of the Morning Chronicle, It is easy to imagine the heads 
 of the brother and sister bent together over Coleridge's 
 preface, and especially over the paragraph that ran : 
 " The effusions signed ' C. L.' were written by Mr. 
 Charles Lamb of the India House ; independently of 
 their signature, their superior merit would have suffi- 
 ciently distinguished them." And while Mary said 
 " Of course," perhaps Charles was wondering how, if 
 ever, the book, and the sonnets, and especially that httle 
 sentence in the preface about " Mr. Charles Lamb of the 
 India House," would be looked on by those mild blue 
 eyes in Hertfordshire. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE MIGHTY DEBT 
 
 The London Times and other papers of Monday, 
 Sept. 2^, 1796, published, without giving any names, 
 the details of a tragedy that had occurred on the 
 previous Thursday in a house " in the neighbourhood 
 of Holbom." 
 
 A lady had died in consequence of a wound inflicted 
 by the hand of her daughter. It appeared that, while 
 the family were making ready for dinner, the daughter, 
 seizing a knife from the table, had pursued a Httle girl — 
 her apprentice — round the room, and then suddenly 
 turned on her own mother, who had intervened, and 
 stabbed her to the heart. The child's cries had brought 
 assistance, but too late. A coroner's jury, sitting next 
 day, had " of course " brought in the verdict — lunacy, 
 
 A paragraph in the True Briton stated that the 
 daughter's " carriage towards her mother " had always 
 been *' affectionate in the extreme," and that she had 
 lately been nursing her mother through an illness, " by 
 
26 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 day and by night." And some of the papers contra- 
 dicted,, as "without foundation," a report that "the 
 young lady had an insane brother in confinement." 
 
 In all the first horror of the event, poor Charles wrote 
 off to Coleridge : 
 
 " My dearest Friend, — ^White, or some of my 
 friends, or the public papers, by this time may have 
 informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen 
 on our family. I will only give you the outlines. My 
 poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been 
 the death of her own mother. I was at hand only 
 time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. 
 She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear she 
 must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me 
 my senses. I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my 
 judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor father was 
 sHghtly wounded, and 1 am left to take care of him 
 and my aunt. ]\Ir, Norris,^ of the Blue-coat School, has 
 been very, very kind to us, and we have no other friend ; 
 but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and able 
 to do the best that remains to do. Write as religious 
 a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and 
 done with. With me ' the former things are passed 
 away,' and I have something more to do than to feel. 
 
 '' God Almighty have us all in His keeping ! 
 
 " C. Lamb. 
 *' Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every 
 vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do as you please,^ 
 but if you publish, pubHsh mine (I give free leave) 
 without name or initial, and never send me a book, 
 I charge you. 
 
 ^ Mr. Randal Norris, sub-treasurer of the Inner Temple, a life- 
 long friend of Charles ILiamb. It is not known what connection he 
 had with the Blue-coat School. 
 
 ^ Coleridge was preparing a second edition of his Poems , with 
 additional poems in it by Charles Lamb. 
 
THE MIGHTY DEBT 27 
 
 "• Your own judgment will convince you not to take 
 any notice of this yet to your dear wife.^ You look 
 after your family ; I have my reason and strength left to 
 take care of mine. I charge you, don't think of coming 
 to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God 
 Almighty love you and all of us 
 
 " G Lamb." 
 
 Coleridge must have answered quickly. A few days 
 later, Charles wrote again : 
 
 " Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. 
 It will be a comfort to you, I know, to know that 
 our prospects are somewhat brighter. My poor dear, 
 dearest sister, the unhappy and unconscious instrument 
 of the Almighty's judgments on our house, is restored 
 to her senses, — to a dreadful sense and recollection of 
 what has passed, awful to her mind, and impressive (as 
 it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious 
 resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgment, 
 which, in this early stage^ knows how to distinguish 
 between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy 
 and the terrible guilt of a mother's murder. I have seen 
 her. I found her, this morning, calm and serene ; far, 
 very, very far, from an indecent, forgetful serenity ; she 
 has a most affectionate and tender concern for what has 
 happened. Indeed, from the beginning — frightful and 
 hopeless as her disorder seemed — I had confidence 
 enough in her strength of mind and religious principle, 
 to look forward to a time when even she might recover 
 tranquillity. God be praised, Coleridge! wonderful as 
 it is to tell, I have never once been otherwise than 
 collected and calm ; even on the dreadful day, and in 
 the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a tranquillity 
 which bystanders may have construed into indifference 
 tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me 
 ^ Mrs. Coleridge's first child was born soon after. 
 
28 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 to say that it was a religious principle that most sup- 
 ported me ? I allow much to other favourable circum- 
 stances. I felt that I had something else to do than to 
 regret. On that first evening my aunt was lying in- 
 sensible — to all appearance hke one dying ; my father, 
 with his poor forehead plaistered over, from a wound 
 he had received from a daughter, dearly loved by him, 
 and who loved him no less dearly ; my mother a dead and 
 murdered corpse in the next room ; yet was I wonder- 
 fully supported. I closed not my eyes in sleep that 
 night, but lay without terrors and without despair. I 
 have lost no sleep since. I had been long used not to 
 rest in things of sense, — had endeavoured after a com- 
 prehension of mind, unsatisfied with the ' ignorant 
 present time,' and this kept me up. I had the whole 
 weight of the family thrown on me ; for my brother, little 
 disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at 
 any time to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, 
 with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties, and I 
 was now left alone. . . . 
 
 *' Our friends have been very good. Sam Le Grice, 
 who was then in town, was with me the first three 
 or four days, and was as a brother to me ; gave up 
 every hour of his time, to the very hurting of his health 
 and spirits, in constant attendance and humouring my 
 poor father ; talked with him, read to him, played at 
 cribbage with him (for so short is the old man's recollec- 
 tion that he was playing at cards, as though nothing 
 had happened, while the coroner's inquest was sitting 
 over the way !). Samuel wept tenderly when he went 
 away, for his mother wrote him a very severe letter on 
 his loitering so long in town, and he was forced to go. 
 
 *' Mr. Norris, of Christ's Hospital, has been as a father to 
 me — Mrs. Norris as a mother ; though we had few claims 
 on them. A gentleman, brother to my godmother, 
 from whom we never had right or reason to expect 
 
THE MIGHTY DEBT 29 
 
 any such assistance, sent my father twenty pounds ; and 
 to crown all these God's blessings to our family at such 
 a time, an old lady, a cousin of my father and aunt's, 
 a gentlewoman of fortune, is to take my aunt and make 
 her comfortable for the short remainder of her days. 
 My aunt is recovered, and as well as ever, and highly 
 pleased at thoughts of going — and has generously given 
 up the interest of her httle money (which was formerly 
 paid my father for her board) wholely and solely to my 
 sister's use. Reckoning this, we have. Daddy and I, 
 for our two selves and an old maid-servant to look after 
 him, when I am out, which will be necessary, £170 (or 
 £180 rather) a year, out of which we can spare £50 or 
 £60 at least for Mary while she stays at Islington, where 
 she must and shall stay during her father's life, for his 
 and her comfort. I know John will make speeches 
 about it, but she shall not go into an hospital. The 
 good lady of the madhouse, and her daughter, an 
 elegant, sweet-behaved young lady, love her, and are 
 taken with her amazingly ; and I know from her own 
 mouth she loves them, and longs to be with them as 
 much. Poor thing, they say she was but the other 
 morning saying she knew she must go to Bethlem for 
 life ; that one of her brothers would have it so, but the 
 other would wish it not, but be obliged to go with the 
 stream ; that she had often as she passed Bethlem 
 thought it hkely, ' here it may be my fate to end my 
 days,' conscious of a certain flightiness in her poor 
 head oftentimes, and mindful of more than one severe 
 illness of that nature before. A legacy of £100, which 
 my father will have at Christmas, and that £20 I men- 
 tioned before, with what is in the house, will much more 
 than set us clear. If my father, an old servant-maid, 
 and I, can't Hve, and live comfortably, on £130 or £120 a 
 year, we ought to bum by slow fires ; and I almost 
 would, that Mary might not go into an hospital. Let 
 
30 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 me not leave one unfavourable impression on your 
 mind respecting my brother. Since this has happened, 
 he has been very kind and brotherly ; but I fear for his 
 mind : he has taken his ease in the world, and is not 
 fit himself to struggle with difficulties, nor has much 
 accustomed himself to throw himself into their way ; 
 and I know his language is already, ' Charles, you must 
 take care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself of 
 a single pleasure you have been used to,' &c. &c., and 
 in that style of talking. But you, a Necessarian, can 
 respect a difference of mind, and love what is amiable 
 in a character not perfect. He has been very good ; but 
 I fear for his mind. Thank God, I can unconnect myself 
 with him, and shall manage all my father's monies in 
 future myself, if I take charge of Daddy, which poor 
 John has not even hinted a wish, at any future time 
 even, to share with me. The lady at this madhouse 
 assures me that I may dismiss immediately both doctor 
 and apothecary, retaining occasionally a composing 
 draught or so for a while ; and there is a less expensive 
 estabhshment in her house, where she will not only have 
 a room and nurse to herself for £50 or guineas a year — 
 the outside would be £60. You know by economy how 
 much more even I shall be able to spare for her comforts. 
 She will, I fancy, if she stays, make one of the family, 
 rather than of the patients ; and the old and young ladies 
 I Hke exceedingly, and she loves dearly ; and they, as the 
 saying is, take to her very extraordinarily, if it is extra- 
 ordinary that people who see my sister should love her. 
 Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister 
 was most and thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of 
 selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, poor dear, 
 dearest soul, in a future letter, for my own comfort, for I 
 understand her thoroughly ; and, if I mistake not, m the 
 most trying situation that a human being can be found 
 in, she will be found (I speak not with sufficient humility, 
 
THE MIGHTY DEBT 81 
 
 I fear, but humanly and foolishly speaking) — she will 
 be found, I trust, uniformly great and amiable. God 
 keep her in her present mind ! — ^to whom be thanks and 
 praise for all His dispensations to mankind." 
 
 It is impossible to approach a chapter of human life 
 such as this — so unique in its horror and its helplessness 
 — with any mental preconception of the nature and com- 
 plexity of the human feelings involved. The reader's 
 attitude must be that of scientific observation, not of 
 biographical criticism. It is obvious that in these 
 letters, written in a state of mental exaltation, some 
 feehngs are passionately expressed, and others as re- 
 solutely kept unspoken. To come to any understanding 
 of why this should be — of the boy's state of mind when 
 he wrote this letter — one thing must be realised. The 
 woman who committed the act was the " unconscious 
 instrument." Nobody had the faintest suspicion that 
 her feelings towards the mother were other than those 
 of tender love and supreme devotion. It was as if she 
 had stood by, paralysed, and seen another commit the 
 act. And the boy — son and brother — from that first 
 moment when he reached the scene in time to take the 
 knife from Mary's hand, realised that the Nemesis that 
 had overtaken them had demanded, not one sacrifice, 
 but two : that, while the one sacrifice was the poor, 
 placid, dead mother, whom nothing could touch further, 
 the other was the still-Hving creature, racked on the 
 same sacrificial altar — both victims of the same great, 
 inscrutable, sacrificial Law : *' Vengeance is mine, saith 
 the Lord." 
 
 And so, in the hour of supreme effort, the boy, in 
 self-preservation, had shut back certain feelings ; his 
 passionate tenderness and regret were to come in 
 paroxysms. " Indignation, the rage of grief, something 
 like remorse" rushed upon the mind of the poor boy 
 when he knelt by the dead mother, " who, through life, 
 
 c 
 
32 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 wished nothing but her children's welfare." But he 
 kept these f eeHngs resolutely behind him : 
 
 " The former things are passed away. I have some- 
 thing more to do than to feel." 
 
 Mrs. Lamb was buried in the churchyard of St. 
 Andrew's, Holbom. Mary was for some months in an 
 asylum ; but, after a time, under special conditions 
 (it has been thought that apphcation was made to the 
 Home Secretary) Charles was allowed to take her out 
 of restraint ; and his guardianship was accepted as 
 security for the future. He never brought her home 
 during the father's lifetime, and the father Uved for 
 two years longer. 
 
 Meantime, Charles and his father, with their old 
 servant, set up housekeeping in a httle comer house in 
 Chapel Street, Pentonville. Aunt Hetty, who was not 
 at all happy with the rich relation, had very soon re- 
 turned to them. During those last two years of his 
 father's life, Charles made it his practice to spend his 
 days at his desk in the India House, his evenings playing 
 cribbage with the old man, and his Sundays and holidays 
 with Mary. It was perhaps at this time that he began 
 going with Mary to the Unitarian chapel at Hackney, 
 and finding comfort in the gentle Hmitations and 
 ilhmitabie simplicity of the Unitarian's creed. His 
 letters to Coleridge about this time are imbued with 
 Unitarianism. He sympathised, like a woman, with 
 his restless friend : " May your soul," he wrote, '* find 
 peace at last in your cottage life." He was proud to be 
 Coleridge's friend and brother-confessor, but he quite 
 frankly reasoned with him in matters where they 
 disagreed. Charles Lamb was a keen critic as well as 
 an enthusiastic friend. At this time he was influenc- 
 ing Coleridge towards Unitarianism ; combating a 
 mysticism that seemed to lead to the idolatrous ; 
 *' mystical notions, and the pride of metaphysics." He 
 
IMMORTAL FRIENDSHIPS 33 
 
 warned Coleridge against trying to bring together " the 
 feeble narrow-sphered operations of the human intellect, 
 and the everywhere diffused mind of Deity, the peerless 
 wisdom of Jehovah." He knew that the phrase *' a par- 
 taker of the Divine Nature " was to be met with in 
 Scripture ; but he feared that a meaning was in these 
 days affixed to it which the simple fishermen of Gahlee 
 had never intended to convey. He appealed rather for 
 the " humility of genuine piety," which looked to the 
 heavenly Father, rejoicing in the names " dear children," 
 " brethren," seeking to know no further. . . . 
 
 And he and Mary, children indeed, were reading books 
 together ; for reading, Charles told Coleridge, had been 
 Mary's daily bread ever since the days when they had 
 both been allowed to " browse " among the old folios 
 in Mr. Salt's library. 
 
 Gently and patiently the young brother was bringing 
 her back from the land of shadows. It was he now that 
 took her hand, she who put her hand in his. Looking 
 up at him, she was not afraid. " The spirit of my mother," 
 she told him, " seems to descend and smile upon me, 
 bidding me Hve to enjoy the life and reason which the 
 Almighty has given me. . . ." 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 IMMORTAL FRIENDSHIPS 
 
 Even in those first dreary months following the tragedy, 
 and while Mary was still in the asylum, Charles had been 
 persuaded to recall his impetuous words " mention 
 nothing of poetry : if you pubhsh, pubhsh mine without 
 name or initial." For Coleridge was preparing a second 
 edition of his poems — it was about a year in preparation, 
 and appeared in the summer of 1797 — and Charles, who 
 had contributed the four little sonnets to the first 
 
34 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 edition, had been called upon for more. Charles, as 
 the preface to this second edition sets forth, had " com- 
 municated " to Coleridge " a complete collection of all 
 his poems " ; and he had also sent with them a Httle 
 motto, or dedication, which he wished to see printed 
 immediately under the imposing title-page to his portion 
 of the volume : " Poems, by Charles Lamb of the 
 Lidia House": 
 
 Motto 
 
 *' This beauty, in the blossom of my youth, 
 When my first fire knew no adulterate incense, 
 Nor I no way to flatter but my fondness, 
 In the best language my true tongue could tell me, 
 And all the broken sighs my sick heart lend me, 
 I sued and served. Long did I love this lady." 
 
 Massingeb. 
 
 The Dedication 
 
 The few following Poems, 
 
 Creatures of the Fancy and the Feeling 
 
 In Life's more vacant hours^ 
 
 Produced, for the most part, by 
 
 Love in Idleness, 
 
 are, 
 
 With all a Brother's fondness, 
 
 Inscribed to 
 
 Mary Anne Lamb, 
 
 The author's best friend and sister. 
 
 " This," wrote Charles to Coleridge, *' is the pomp 
 and paraphernalia of parting with which I take leave 
 of a passion which has reigned so royally (so long) within 
 me ; thus, with its trappings of laureatship, I fling it 
 off, pleased and satisfied with myself that the weakness 
 troubles me no longer. I am wedded, Coleridge, to the 
 fortunes of my sister and my poor old father. ..." 
 
 So he took leave of the Anna of his dreams : " 'Twas 
 a weakness, concerning which I may say, m the words of 
 Petrarch (whose Life is open before me), *if it drew me 
 
IMMORTAL FRIENDSHIPS 35 
 
 out of some vices, it also prevented the growth of many 
 virtues.' " 
 
 The verses to which he now looked with satisfaction — 
 " which profit me in the recollection," as he expressed 
 it — were his sonnet to Mary, written in a lucid interval, 
 and those lines on the dear old " grandame," about 
 whose memory clung all the romance of his Hertfordshire 
 childhood. 
 
 "... On the green hill top, 
 Hard by the house of prayer, a modest roof. 
 And not distinguished from its neighbour barn, 
 Save by a slender-tapering length of spire, 
 The Grandame sleeps. ..." 
 
 The mind of this sohtary boy of two-and-twenty was 
 now wholly set back in the domestic past : " the days, 
 Coleridge, of a mother^s fondness for her schoolboy. 
 What would I not give to call her back to earth for one 
 (Jay !— on my knees to ask her pardon for all those Httle 
 asperities of temper which, from time to time, have given 
 her gentle spirit pain ! . . ." 
 
 So, at his desk at the India House, or on his way back 
 and forward between Leadenhall Street and Penton- 
 ville, he was hving over again the Hfe of Crown Office 
 Eow and the old Blue-coat School. It was only 
 ''two Christmases ago" — but what a guK between! — 
 since he and Coleridge were writing sonnets together 
 in ''that nice little smoky room at the 'Salutation,' 
 which is even now continually presenting itself to my 
 recollection, with aU its associated train of pipes, 
 tobacco, egg-hot, welsh-rabbit, metaphysics, and poetry. 
 —Are we never to meet again ? " 
 
 There did not seem to be much chance ; for Coleridge 
 was just then moving his httle household to Nether 
 Stowey, hoping to find peace in a market-garden, and 
 Charles Lamb was very much in Chapel Street, Penton- 
 ville. 
 
36 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 *' I am got home at last," he wrote to Coleridge ; " and, 
 after repeated games at cribbage, have got my father's 
 leave to write awhile ; with difficulty got it, for when I 
 expostulated about playing any more, he very aptly 
 replied, ' If you won't play with me, you might as well 
 not come home at all.' The argument was unanswer- 
 able, and I set to afresh." 
 
 The sordid anxieties of life pressed hard on the boy. 
 Poverty and sickness had left him " somewhat non- 
 plussed." 
 
 " My poor old aunt, whom you have seen, the kindest, 
 goodest creature to me when I was at school ; who used 
 to toddle there to bring me good things, when I, school- 
 boy Hke, only despised her for it, and used to be ashamed 
 to see her come and sit herself down on the old coal-hole 
 steps, as you went into the old grammar school, and open 
 her apron, and bring out her bason, with some nice thing 
 she had caused to be saved for me ; the good old creature 
 is now l3dng on her death-bed . . . she says, poor thing, 
 she is glad she is come home to die with me." 
 
 Aunt Hetty died early in 1797 ; and about the same 
 time two other things happened. Mary was removed 
 from the asylum to lodgings in Hackney, and Charles 
 Lamb made a new literary friend. 
 
 This was Charles Lloyd, "a young gentleman of 
 fortune," son of the fine old Birmingham philanthropist 
 and banker ; an amiable young Quaker, who did not 
 like banking, and did, very much, like poetry.^ Lloyd, 
 who had been Uving at Bristol for the sake of Coleridge's 
 literary companionship, and was also a contributor to 
 the new edition of Coleridge's poems, had evidently 
 heard so much from Coleridge about poor Charles Lamb, 
 that — being one day in London — he came knocking at 
 Lamb's door. Of course Lamb celebrated the occasion 
 in verse : 
 
 ^ Lloyd's sister married Christopher Wordsworth (afterwards 
 Master of Trinity College, Cambridge), brother of the poet. 
 
IMMORTAL FRIENDSHIPS 37 
 
 " Alone, obscure, without a friend, 
 A cheerless, solitary thing. 
 Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out ? 
 What offering can the stranger bring ? 
 
 Long, lonof, within my aching heart. 
 The grateful sense shall cherished be ; 
 I'll think less meanly of myself. 
 That Lloyd will sometimes think of me." 
 
 Lloyd was so pleased with his new friend that for a 
 time he took up his abode at the " Bull and Mouth," the 
 old coaching-inn in St. Martin's-le-Grand, known even 
 before the Fire of London as a rendezvous of the Quakers. 
 He settled down in London to be near Lamb, as, before, 
 he settled in Bristol to be with Coleridge ; and Charles 
 Lamb, as was to be expected, came quickly under the 
 charm of the Quaker's gentle nature. Cowper, " the 
 divine chit-chat " of Cowper, had of late succeeded 
 Bowles's sonnets in Lamb's poetic affections. He felt 
 a special sympathy for Cowper, a fellow-sufferer in 
 *' the sorest malady of all." But he read omnivorously : 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, Biirger, Massinger, Izaak 
 Walton, Rousseau's Confessions, besides, of course, 
 Southey, and always Coleridge's own poems, as fast as 
 they were written. Now, fascinated by Lloyd (Lloyd, 
 too, was afterwards to suffer, like Cowper, from " the 
 sorest malady of all "), Lamb took to reading Penn and 
 Woolman ; Lloyd, he declared, was almost turning him 
 Quaker. " I am dearly fond of Charles Lloyd," he wrote. 
 " He is all goodness." And Lloyd's visit — ^though 
 Lloyd at the *'Bull and Mouth" was a very different 
 tiling from Coleridge at the " Salutation and Cat " — did 
 put heart into the sohtary boy. And when July came, 
 and the volume of poems was through the press, and 
 Leadenhall Street was getting very hot and stuffy, the 
 India House authorities gave Charles a hoHday, and he 
 shut up his desk and set off by coach to visit Coleridge at 
 
38 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 Nether Stowey. Coleridge's wife was very kind to him, 
 and little Hartley, " the minute philosopher," of whom 
 he had heard so much in letters, was cutting his teeth. 
 Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, just come to 
 Alfoxden, were often with the Coleridges. Southey 
 and his wife were in Hampshire, and Lloyd was Hving 
 with them ; and, on his way home, Lamb stayed with 
 the Southeys too. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, 
 all in one summer hoHday ! It was a very happy 
 holiday for Charles Lamb ; though it was then that 
 Coleridge, when he had hurt his foot, and everybody 
 else went out for a walk, wrote " This hme-tree bower 
 my prison," and made poor Lamb wince under the 
 epithet " my gentle-hearted Charles." And the visit 
 ended, as the visits of poets will : 
 
 " You will oblige me by sending me my greatcoat, 
 which I left behind, in the oblivious state the mind is 
 thrown into at parting. Is it not ridiculous that I 
 sometimes envy that greatcoat lingering so cunningly 
 behind 1 At present I have none ; so send it to me by a 
 Stowey waggon, if there be such a thing. ..." 
 
 And he goes on to say how stupid he had felt, *' most 
 like a sulky child," among them all. " But company 
 and converse are strange to me. It was kind in you all 
 to endure me as you did." 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 *' ROSAMUND gray" 
 
 Back in London, after that summer hoHday, poor 
 Charles was depressed, gloomy, and irritable. The 
 dreaded anniversary came round; and his depression 
 may be read in the lines " Written a year after the 
 Events," and '' Written on Christmas Day, 1797." 
 Something also had come between him and Coleridge : 
 
'ROSAMUND GRAY" 89 
 
 was it the Wordsworths, brother and sister, with whom 
 Coleridge was spending so much of his time, writing 
 Lyrical Ballads as they wandered on the Quantock 
 Hills ? There had been noticeable a tinge of patronage 
 in Coleridge's manner, which had hurt Charles ; and 
 Coleridge had not only forgotten to write of late, but 
 had forgotten to send back the greatcoat : 
 
 " I wish you would send me my greatcoat. The 
 snow and the rain season is at hand, and I have but a 
 wretched old coat, once my father's, to keep 'em off. . . . 
 Meet emblem wilt thou be, Old Winter, of a friend's 
 neglect — cold, cold, cold ! " 
 
 There had been a day — ^not so long ago, but before 
 the " Events " — ^when Charles Lamb had been able to 
 give Coleridge a helping hand : 
 
 " Dear Coleridge," runs a letter dated May 1796, 
 " make yourself perfectly easy about May. I paid his 
 bill when I sent your clothes. I was flush of money, 
 and am so still to all the purposes of a single life ; so 
 give yourself no further concern about it. The money 
 would be superfluous to me if I had it." 
 
 If Charles remembered this now, he certainly never 
 said so ; and he never would hear of Coleridge's paying 
 him back that £15. None the less he winced under the 
 epithet " gentle-hearted," for, in spite of his shyness, 
 and his stammer, and his poverty, there was nothing 
 unmanly about Charles Lamb. To him, Coleridge, seen 
 in his home with Sara and the baby, may have appeared 
 only half a hero : if Charles Lamb had had a wife and 
 child, he would have managed to support them some- 
 how. And, at this time, he was feeling very sore, and 
 inclined to pick a quarrel with everybody. He had 
 " well-nigh quarrelled with Charles Lloyd." For Lloyd, 
 though he was " all goodness," did not fully appreciate 
 Lamb's line of conduct about Mary ; and Mary and the 
 old father — " my little family," as Charles Lamb called 
 
40 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 them — were very dear to him. With the best intentions, 
 Lloyd was for drawing him into the literary world, and 
 away from them ; and so he quarrelled with Lloyd. 
 It was in the lowest depth of depression, in that January 
 1798, that he wrote the Hnes, since become so famous : 
 
 The Old Familiar Faces 
 Where are they gone, the old familiar faces ? 
 
 I had a mother, but she died, and left me, 
 Died prematurely, in a day of horrors — 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar iaces. 
 
 I have had playmates, I have had companions. 
 
 In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays — 
 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have been laughing, I have been carousing, 
 Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies — 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I loved a love once, fairest among women, 
 Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her — 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man.^ 
 Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly ; 
 Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces. 
 
 Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood. 
 Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse. 
 Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 
 
 Friend of my bosom, thou more than brother ! ^ 
 Why wert thou not born in my father's dwelling ? 
 So might we talk of the old familiar faces. 
 
 For some they have died, and some they have left me, 
 A7id some are taken from me ; all are departed ; 
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
 
 A month or two later Coleridge had left Stowey, to 
 act as assistant to a Unitarian minister in Shrewsbury ; 
 ^ Lloyd. 2 Coleridge. 
 
*' ROSAMUND GRAY'' 41 
 
 it was just before he accepted the Wedgwoods' allow- 
 ance of £150 a year for Kfe. Lloyd, the kind friend 
 whom Lamb had " left abruptly," had been in London, 
 and they had made up their Httle quarrel. Lamb, 
 though professing himself to be *' jealous of human 
 helps and leaning-places," found himself wonderfully 
 comforted by " Lloyd's smile." Very soon after the 
 writing of this poem, they were publishing together a 
 little half-crown volume of " Blank verse by Charles 
 Lloyd and Charles Lamb " ; and when in those same 
 months Charles sat himself down of an evening in the 
 window of his Httle parlour to write his prose-romance 
 of Rosamund Gray (Lloyd was writing a novel, too), 
 he took his heroine's name (nothing else) from one of 
 Lloyd's songs, written a year or two before. As Charles 
 wrote, the moon shone in at his window ; and the 
 moonlight idealised even Chapel Street, Pentonville. 
 
 The Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret 
 has long been reckoned one of Lamb^s most exquisite bits 
 of prose- writing, though, as a story — ^a work of art — it is 
 as crude as it is exquisite. The plot, if it can be called a 
 plot, was suggested by a Hne or two of an old ballad : 
 
 " An old woman clothed in grey, 
 Whose daughter was charming and yonng, 
 And she was deluded away 
 By Roger's false flattering tongue." 
 
 " Nothing else," wrote Lamb to Southey, '' but the 
 words of that fooHsh ballad, put me upon scribbhng 
 my Rosamund,'^'* 
 
 The story is a strange medley of the real and auto- 
 biographic, told with almost Pre-RaphaeUte detail, and 
 the purely fictitious, clothed in a boy's riotous imagina- 
 tion. For the scene of the story is laid in the village 
 of Widford, in Hertfordshire. Old Margaret bears 
 strong resemblance to the Grandmother Field, of 
 Blakesware. Allan Clare, the boy-lover, the '' sweet- 
 
42 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 dispositioned youth," is what Charles Lamb was, or 
 wished to be. There are shadowy forms, suggestive 
 of Coleridge, the friend, and Mary, the elder sister. The 
 cottage is " Blenheims," where Ann Simmons really 
 hved ; and Rosamund Gray is Charles Lamb's ideal of 
 womanhood, his fair-haired maid — " the most beautiful 
 young creature that eyes ever beheld." 
 
 " Her face had the sweetest expression in it, a gentle- 
 ness — a modesty — a, timidity — a certain charm — a grace 
 without a name. There was a sort of melancholy 
 mingled with her smile . . . something which the 
 poet Young might have remembered when he composed 
 that perfect line : 
 
 * Soft, modest, melancholy, female, fair.' 
 
 She was a mild-eyed maid, and everybody loved her 
 Young Allan Clare, when but a boy, sighed for her." 
 
 " He was never happier than when he could get 
 Rosamund to walk out with him. He would make her 
 admire the scenes he admired — ^fancy the wild-flowers 
 he fancied — watch the clouds he was watching — and not 
 unfrequently repeat to her poetry which he loved, and 
 make her love it. . . ." 
 
 There, in effect, the reahties end and the riotous 
 imagination begins. A villain, Matravis, comes into 
 the plot, the impersonation of '' black manhood " ; 
 and the story that opens in innocence and sunshine 
 finishes in night and silence, in horror and anguish 
 and despair. The fate of Rosamund Gray is a dark and 
 tragic fate; whereas the only tragic thing about the 
 real story of Charles Lamb and Ann Simmons is that 
 Ann Simmons did not marry Charles Lamb. She be- 
 came the prosperous wife of somebody else. She 
 married, in fact, Mr. Bartrum, the silversmith and 
 pawnbroker of Princes Street, Leicester Square. She 
 must have been living for many a year quite near to 
 
"ROSAMUND GRAY" 43 
 
 Charles Lamb : he must have sometimes heard of her ; 
 he often thought and wrote of her, veiHng her identity 
 under a fictitious name. He must have passed the 
 door of Mr. Bartrum's shop many a time when he paid 
 his visits to his beloved old bookshops in Wardour 
 Street and Princes Street itself ; but there is no evidence 
 that Charles Lamb ever saw his fair-haired maid — ^the 
 Anna of his dreams — ^again. 
 
 " Closed are her doors on me : I must not see her." ^ 
 
 " Rosamund sells well in London," wrote Lamb to 
 Southey a month or two after its appearance. The 
 volume of blank verse had been a failure ; but the 
 " miniature romance " had brought Lamb a few pounds ; 
 and, as a first sign of success, he paid a visit to his 
 tailor : 
 
 " My tailor has brought me home a new coat, lapelled, 
 with a velvet collar. He assures me everybody wears 
 velvet collars now. Some are bom fashionable, some 
 achieve fashion, and others, like your humble servant, 
 have fashion thrust upon them. . . ." 
 
 Towards the end of 1798 Coleridge and the Words- 
 worths were in Germany, and Southey had taken 
 Coleridge's place as Lamb's Hterary correspondent. 
 Lamb was to be a contributor to Southey's Annual 
 Anthology. 
 
 " I hear that the Two Noble Enghshmen have parted 
 no sooner than they set foot on German earth," Lamb 
 wrote to Southey. He was still hurt and angry with 
 Coleridge; for Coleridge, before departing, had left a 
 singularly untacttul message for him with Lloyd : 
 
 ^ Mrs. Tween, the daughter of Randal Norris, was Canon 
 Ainger's authority that Ann Simmons of Widford was Lamb's 
 fair-haired maido The second Mrs. Norris belonged to Widford ; 
 and the story seems to have been quite well known. A daughter 
 of the fair-haired maid, Miss Maria Bartrum, married (in 1840, after 
 Lamb's death) William Coulson, the great London surgeon. She 
 is described as " notable for her skill in painting, as well as her 
 attractive manners and great intelligence." 
 
44 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 '' Tell Charles Lamb if he requires any knowledge, he 
 may apply to me." 
 
 And Lamb had straightway drawn up and sent to 
 Coleridge his Theses Quaedam Theologicae, He desired to 
 know " whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati 
 ever sneer, ^^ and "whether God loves a lying angel 
 better than a true man," and " whether pure intelli- 
 gences can love, or whether they can love anything be- 
 sides pure intellect ? " and several other things — bitter 
 and uncomfortable questions, which Coleridge had not 
 answered ; because Coleridge was hurt and angry too. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 POVERTY AND POPULARITY 
 
 The year 1800 found Charles and Mary domiciled 
 together. Old John Lamb had died in the previous year, 
 and was buried with his wife and Aunt Hetty in the 
 churchyard of St. Andrew's, Holbom ; and as soon as 
 might be, Charles had brought his sister to hve with 
 him in Chapel Street, Pentonville. For a time all 
 went well. Lamb walked daily from Pentonville to 
 the India House, and in the interstices of tea and 
 indigo wrote many letters to Southey, Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, and other people. Mary was *' never in 
 better health and spirits." Coleridge had come back 
 from Germany, and was in London, translating from 
 the German and writing for the Morning Post. The 
 quarrel between the two friends was made up ; and in 
 March 1800 Coleridge was actually staying with the 
 Lambs in Pentonville, translating Wallenstein, clad in a 
 very old dressing-gown, " value five pence," in which he 
 looked like a conjuror. 
 
 ** I am living in a continuous feast," wrote Lamb : 
 " Coleridge has been with me now for nigh three weeks ; 
 
POVERTY AND POPULARITY 45 
 
 and the more I see of him, in the quotidian undress and 
 relaxation of his mind, the more cause I see to love 
 him, and beHeve him a very good man, and all those 
 foolish impressions to the contrary fly off like morning 
 slumbers. ..." 
 
 But in IVIay the Lambs' old servant fell ill and died ; 
 and Mary, unfit for domestic trials, broke down, and 
 was taken away again to the asylum. Left quite alone 
 in the house, Charles was in despair : 
 
 *' My heart is quite sunk," he wrote to Coleridge, 
 " and I don't know where to look for reUef. Mary will 
 get better again, but her constantly being liable to such 
 relapses is dreadful ; nor is it the least of our evils that 
 her case and aU our story is so well known around us. 
 We are in a manner marked, ... I am completely 
 shipwrecked. My head is quite bad. I almost wish 
 Mary were dead. . . ." 
 
 It was perhaps the lowest moment of Charles Lamb's 
 life ; and then an old schoolfellow, Matthew Gutch, 
 who knew all their story, came to the rescue. 
 
 Gutch was a law-stationer, hving in Southampton 
 Buildings, Chancery Lane, and he offered Lamb three 
 rooms in his house, including the services of an old 
 housekeeper, for £34 a year. Lamb thankfully accepted 
 the offer, realising that nowhere could they find such 
 privacy as " in the midst of London." And so in the 
 autumn of 1800, the brother and sister — Mary well 
 again — ^were for a time, at least, comfortably settled. 
 Lamb was very soon writing with proprietary satisfac- 
 tion about a brace of birds " now dangling before our 
 kitchen blaze." It was pleasant to be near the theatres 
 and his various friends, old and new. " I am deter- 
 mined to take what snatches of pleasure we can between 
 the acts of our distressful drama," he wrote to Coleridge. 
 He made httle jaunts. He went for a few days to Oxford 
 — Gutch's family Hved in Oxford — and visited All Souls* 
 
46 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 and the Bodleian. He had already paid a visit to 
 Cambridge, for Lloyd was lately married and living 
 near Cambridge, and Lamb had stayed with Lloyd and 
 his young wife, and made the acquaintance of Thomas 
 Manning. Manning, then a brilHant and eccentric 
 mathematical tutor at Cambridge, was afterwards to 
 be known as an explorer in China and Thibet, and the 
 greatest Chinese scholar of his time. (To-day he figures 
 in biographical dictionaries as " traveller, and friend 
 of Charles Lamb.") Lamb became strongly attached 
 to Manning : " Manning of Cambridge — a man in a 
 thousand " ; and some of Lamb's most characteristic 
 letters were written to Manning, after Manning went to 
 China. 
 
 Another new friend of this year, introduced by Cole- 
 ridge, was William Godwin, author of Caleh Williams, 
 then a man of five and forty, with whom Lamb was " a 
 good deal pleased." He was. Lamb said, " a very well- 
 behaved, decent man, nothing brilliant about him or 
 imposing " — a man with " neither horns nor claws " ; 
 in fact, " quite a tame creature " in spite of his " noisy 
 fame." Li 1800 Mary Wollstonecraft had been two 
 years dead ; and the widow Clairmont had not yet set 
 her cap, from her balcony, at the " immortal Mr. 
 Godwin." 
 
 Then there was George Dyer, Lamb's old friend ; 
 simple, absent-minded, scholarly ; the old Blue-coat 
 schoolboy, for whom Lamb had a most tender regard : 
 " The oftener I see him, the more deeply I admire him," 
 he wrote ; and he never had reason to change his mind 
 about George Dyer. 
 
 The modest success achieved by Rosamund had set 
 Charles to work on a five-act tragedy in blank verse, 
 John Woodvil, or Pride's Cure, as it was at first 
 called. Neither Coleridge nor Southey particularly 
 admired this production ; and Kemble, then manager 
 
POVERTY AND POPULARITY 47 
 
 of Drury Lane, to whom Lamb sent it at Christmas 
 1799, lost the manuscript. Nearly a year later, when 
 Lamb wrote inquiring its fate, Kemble made what 
 amends he could * asked for another copy, promised 
 a " definite answer " within a week, and even gave 
 Lamb a personal interview. But he declined the play 
 as " unsuitable " ; and once more Lamb was dependent 
 on his clerk's salary, with what additional he could 
 make by his little contributions to the Morning Post, 
 the Chronicle, and the Albion, The editor of the Morning 
 Post employed him to furnish " witty paragraphs " at 
 the rate of sixpence a joke — six jokes a day ! And he 
 was glad to do it, though it meant getting up two hours 
 before breakfast. Poverty and popularity seemed to 
 go hand in hand. Lamb had so increased his circle of 
 friends that Gutch's rooms in Southampton Buildings 
 resembled at times a "' Minister's levee." Perhaps that 
 was why Lamb " received a hint " that it would be 
 agreeable to Gutch if the brother and sister could find a 
 domicile elsewhere ; which, in the summer of 1801, they 
 managed to do — in their old home, the Temple. 
 
 Their new quarters were at 16 Mitre Court Buildings ; 
 *' most delectable rooms," from the windows of which, 
 " when you stood on tiptoe," you could look out on the 
 Thames and the Surrey hills. Lamb was dehghted ; 
 he would have " all the privacy of a house without the 
 encumbrances." He would be "as airy, up four pair 
 of stairs, as in the country, and in a garden, in the 
 midst of enchanting (more than Mahometan paradise) 
 London. ..." 
 
 *' Oh her lamps of a night ! her rich goldsmiths, 
 print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardwaremen, pastry- 
 cooks, St. Paul's Churchyard, the Strand, Exeter Change, 
 Charing Cross with the man upon a black horse ! These 
 are thy gods, oh London ! . . . All the streets and 
 pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At least, I 
 
 D 
 
48 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal, 
 — a mmd that loves to be at home in crowds." 
 
 For nearly nine years Charles and Mary were to live 
 in Mitre Court Buildings ; and there, for the most part 
 of this time, they were very poor. " Contented with 
 Httle, yet wishing for more," Lamb lightly expressed it 
 when he wrote to Wordsworth. But Mary Lamb was 
 more confidential to her friend. Miss Stoddart : " It is 
 not well to be very poor, which we certainly are at this 
 present writing." 
 
 John Woodvil had been pubHshed in 1802, but had 
 made no money, though it was duly " cut up " by 
 Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, Coleridge offered to 
 supply Lamb with prose-translations from the German 
 poets for Lamb to turn back into metre for the Morning 
 Post, Another £40 or £50, in addition to his salary, 
 Lamb said, would be " affluence " ; and for a year he 
 did in fact make £100, and then he gave it up. Six 
 jokes a day, before breakfast, were not so exhausting 
 as making metrical versions of Coleridge's translations 
 from the German : " I must cut closer, that's ail." 
 And the brother and sister did " cut closer " ; for Lamb, 
 though he often lent and gave away money, never in 
 his life borrowed, and never ran into debt. 
 
 But even poverty takes a hoHday now and then. 
 In the summer of 1802 Charles and Mary set out for 
 the Lake Country, on a visit to Coleridge. It was 
 their first sight of mountains. They did not tell 
 Coleridge they were coming ; there was no time. They 
 simply arrived, having travelled by coach as far as 
 Penrith and then taken a post-chaise to Keswick. 
 They found Coleridge "in a comfortable house, quite 
 enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains : great 
 floundering bears and monsters, they seemed, all 
 couchant and asleep." For they arrived in the evening, 
 when everything was bathed in the colours of a gorgeous 
 
POVERTY AND POPULARITY 49 
 
 sunset, which presently fading, gave place to the silence 
 and shadows of night. The Lambs had never seen 
 anything Hke it before. " We thought we had got into 
 fairyland." Wordsworth and his sister were away 
 from home ; but they visited the hospitable Clarksons, 
 at Wordsworth's cottage ; and Lamb waded up the 
 bed of Lodore, and they both clambered up to the 
 top of Skiddaw : " Oh, its fine black head, and the 
 bleak air atop of it, with a prospect of mountains all 
 about and about, making you giddy ; and then Scotland . 
 afar off, and the Border countries, so famous in song and 
 ballad ! It was a day that will stand out, hke a 
 mountain, I am sure, in my life." 
 
 What would Charles Lamb have been, if Fate had 
 not always beckoned him back to the " lighted shops 
 of the Strand and Fleet Street " ? In the pure, caller 
 air of Cumberland, " wandering free among the moun- 
 tains," he felt many things possible. 
 
 ** My habits are changing, I think, i.e. from drunk to 
 sober. Whether I shall be happier or not remains to 
 be proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a 
 morning ; but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat, and 
 the marrow, and the kidneys, i.e. the night, glorious, 
 care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours 
 wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from 
 indifferent and flat, to bright and brilliant ! Manning, 
 if I should have formed a diabolical resolution by the 
 time you come to England, of not admitting any 
 spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest 
 on such shameworthy terms ? Is Hfe, with such 
 limitations, worth trying ? The truth is that my 
 liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my house, 
 who consume me. This is a pitiful tale . . . but it is 
 just now nearest my heart." 
 
 What Manning answered is not known ; but it is 
 very certain that, to most of the men of Charles Lamb's 
 
50 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 little cdterie, life would not have seemed worth trying 
 without a considerable amount of *' liquor." It was 
 an age of robust Georgian conviviality, an age of the 
 bumper and the " flowing bowl," when Pitt was Prime 
 Minister and Miss Austen could speak almost de- 
 ferentially of a gentleman "in his cups." And for 
 literary and dramatic London, it was still the age of 
 the taverns ; of sanded floors, and porter, and gin, and 
 " punch." The Shakespearian glories of the Mermaid 
 in Bread Street had descended on the Mitre Coffee- 
 house of Dr. Johnson, and Boswell, and " Goldy " ; and 
 the Old Mitre in Fleet Street was still flourishing within 
 a stone's-throw of Lamb's rooms in the Temple. 
 Tennyson's Head Waiter at the Cock must have been 
 quite a young man in those days. 
 
 And so, though Charles Lamb, with his love of 
 hyperbole and his inveterate habit of making " copy " 
 out of himself, has been his own worst accuser, there 
 is no doubt that he used too often to come home, as 
 poor Mary expressed it, " very smoky and drinky " ; 
 that he did find alcohol the one strong temptation of an 
 exceptionally noble, unselfish, and unhappy life. And 
 there is no doubt that he fought against it, bravely, 
 if intermittently. A brain like Charles Lamb's ought 
 surely never to have been touched by alcohol. Frail 
 in body, nervous and excitable, he was easily affected 
 by it. According to Procter, a very Httle liquor dis- 
 turbed his speech, " which at best was but an eloquent 
 stammer." Yet Procter asserts that in all the twenty 
 years he knew Lamb intimately, he only once saw him 
 drink " immoderately," and that much injustice has been 
 done to Lamb by accusing him of " excess in drinking.'* 
 
 What, in that day and that coterie, was moderation, 
 and what was excess ? Perhaps, after all, the best 
 proof that Lamb, in spite of his undeniably " too much 
 punch and too much tobacco " was no habitual drunkard. 
 
POVERTY AND POPULARITY 51 
 
 is that for thirty-three years — ^from 1792 to 1825 — he 
 performed the duties of his clerkship at the East India 
 House with punctuaHty and method, and that during 
 that time his salary was increased from £70 to nearly 
 £700 a year. 
 
 " A small spare man, clothed in black," he " went out 
 every morning and returned every afternoon, as re- 
 gularly as the hands of the clock moved towards certain 
 hours. You could not mistake him. He was somewhat 
 stiff in manner, and almost clerical in dress, which in- 
 dicated much wear. He had a long, melancholy face, 
 with keen, penetrating eyes, and he walked with a short, 
 resolute step, citywards." ^ 
 
 The Puritan and the Bohemian were blended in 
 Charles Lamb. London, and her lamps of a night, 
 moved his soul, though he was but an onlooker on 
 much that his " Mahometan Paradise " offered ; and 
 there was always the other thing — a pale, daylight idyll — 
 that pleased his Puritan moods. It was in one of these, 
 not long after he returned from the Cumberland holiday, 
 that he penned the little verses in memory of " Hester " 
 — ^the pretty young Quakeress, Hester Savory, who used 
 to pass his window in the old Pentonville days, and who 
 had married and died. He was rather proud of his 
 verses at the time, and he sent them to his friend 
 Manning • and in his whimsical way — always making 
 ** copy " out of himself, he wrote : 
 
 " I send you some verses I have made on the death 
 of a young Quaker you may have heard me speak of as 
 being in love with for some years while I lived at Penton- 
 ville, though I had never spoken to her in my life. She 
 died about a month since. If you have interest with 
 the Abbe de Lisle, you may get 'em translated ; he has 
 done as much for the Georgics." 
 
 Canon Ainger, though he knew so well the misleading 
 1 Procter's Memoir. 
 
52 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 quips and pranks of Lamb's letters to Manning, takes 
 this statement seriously ; but the whole episode speaks 
 for itseK, as, indeed, do the verses, with their cold 
 Puritan grace : 
 
 " When maidens such as Hester die, 
 Their place ye may not well supply, 
 Though ye among a thousand try, 
 With vain endeavour. 
 
 A month or more hath she been dead, 
 Yet cannot I by force be led 
 To think upon the wormy bed, 
 And her together. 
 
 A springy motion in her gait, 
 A rising step, did indicate 
 Of pride and joy no common rate. 
 That flush' d her spirit. 
 
 I know not by what name beside 
 I shall it call : — if 'twas not pride, 
 It was a joy to that allied, 
 She did inherit. 
 
 Her parents held the Quaker rule, 
 Which doth the human feeling cool, 
 But she was trained in Nature's school, 
 Nature had blest her. 
 
 A waking eye, a prying mind, 
 A heart that stirs is hard to bind, 
 A hawk's keen sight ye cannot blind, 
 Ye could not Hester. 
 
 My sprightly neighbour, gone before 
 To that unknown and silent shore, 
 Shall we not meet, as heretofore, 
 Some summer morning, 
 
 When from thy cheerful eyes a ray 
 Hath struck a bliss upon the day, 
 A bliss that would not go away, 
 A sweet forewarning ? " 
 
"BY CHARLES AND MARY LAMB" 53 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 " BY CHARLES AND MARY LAMB '* 
 
 The strangest fact in this strange story is that, when 
 Mary Lamb was not insane, and not in Hoxton Asylum, 
 she was, by all accounts, a woman of sound common- 
 sense and calm judgment, on whom the brother continued 
 to depend for guidance, and sympathy, and advice. 
 If ever Charles acted unwisely, it was because "my 
 guardian angel was away at the time." At first, her 
 attacks of insanity recurred only every two or three 
 years, and lasted only for a few weeks ; but, as time 
 went on, she was oftener away from home, and for 
 longer periods — sometimes as often as twice in a year, 
 and for a month or two at a time. There were always 
 premonitory symptoms ; irritabihty, or other change 
 of manner. Charles knew them weU, and knew that 
 when they appeared, he must act at once. And then 
 the brother would " take her under his arm to Hoxton 
 Asylum." It was very affecting, Procter says, to meet 
 them, walking together, weeping together — carrying 
 Mary's strait- jacket with them — on this painful mission. 
 Usually, after she was well enough to return home, 
 Mary was for a time dull and depressed — on Charles's 
 account, as well as her own ; and then Charles — ^always 
 on the outlook for what might happen, became, in 
 Mary's own words, " feverish and teasing." 
 
 *' Indeed it has been sad and heavy times with us 
 lately," she wrote to her friend Miss Stoddart, in the 
 autumn of 1805. " When I am pretty well, his low 
 spirits throw me back again ; and when he begins to 
 get a httle cheerful, I do the same kind office for him." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both, 
 to see us sit together, looking at each other, with long 
 
54 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 and rueful faces, and saying ' How do you do ? ' and 
 ' How do you do ? ' and then we fall a-crying, and say 
 we will be better on the morrow." 
 
 They began to realise that their very love for each 
 other was proving the torment of their Hves ; but " I 
 am most seriously intending," wrote Mary, " to bend 
 the whole force of my mind to counteract this, and I 
 think I see some prospect of success." 
 
 What was her little scheme ? Was it a plan of co- 
 partnership in Hterary enterprise, the first dream of 
 those books '' by Charles and Mary Lamb " that were 
 to win them hterary popularity ? If so, it was indeed 
 to prove a success. For not long after this, Charles and 
 Mary were actually writing together their Tales from 
 Shakespeare, which were pubUshed in 1807 for " Godwin's 
 bookseller " at the Juvenile Library, in two volumes, 
 " embelHshed with copperplates." 
 
 "You would Hke to see us," wrote Mary now, "as 
 we often sit writing at one table (but not on one cushion 
 sitting) like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer 
 Nighfs Dream ; or rather like an old literary Darby and 
 Joan ; I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while, and 
 saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says 
 till he has finished, and then he finds out that he has 
 made something of it." 
 
 And Charles sent a message from Mary to Manning, 
 then just started for the East : 
 
 *' She said you saw her writings about the other day, 
 and she wishes you should know what they are. She is 
 doing for Godwin's bookseller twenty of Shakespeare's 
 plays, to be made into children's tales. Six are already 
 done by her; to wit. The Tempest, The W interns Tale, 
 Midsummer Nighfs Dream, Mux:h Ado about Nothing, 
 The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Cymbeline. The 
 Merchant of Venice is in forwardness. I have done 
 OthellOy Macbeth, and mean to do all the tragedies. 
 
"BY CHARLES AND IHARY LAMB" 55 
 
 I think it will be popular among the Httle people, besides 
 money. It is to bring in sixty guineas. Mary has done 
 them capitally, I think you'd think. . . ." 
 
 Meanwhile, diaries had been busy on his own account 
 with a farce — ^the celebrated Mr. H — ; and in June 
 1806, he wrote in excellent spirits to Wordsworth. 
 His play had been accepted by the proprietors of Drury 
 Lane, "to be brought forward when the proper oppor- 
 tunity serves." A few months later, it was being re- 
 hearsed, and to come out next week. The chief part 
 was given to Elhston. Lamb's anxiety was great. " 1 
 shall get £200 from the theatre," he writes to Manning 
 in China, " if Mr. H — has a good run, and I hope £100 
 for the copyright. Nothing if it fails ; and there never 
 was a more ticklish thing. The whole depends on the 
 manner in which the name is brought out, which I value 
 myself on, as a chef-d'oeuvre.^^ 
 
 All the world knows what happened to Mr. H — 
 when the name was brought out ! On that eventful 
 night, Charles and Mary sat together " next the orchestra 
 in the pit." And the -pla,y failed ; it was hissed ; and 
 Charles Lamb — critic, as well as author — himself joined 
 in the hissing. 
 
 '' Mary is a Httle cut," wrote Lamb to Miss Stoddart, 
 " at the ill-success of Mr. H — , which came out last 
 night, and failed. . . . We are determined not to be 
 cast down. I am going to leave off tobacco, and then 
 we must thrive. A smoking man must write smoky 
 farces. 
 
 " Mary is pretty well, but I persuaded her to let me 
 write. ..." 
 
 To Wordsworth, on the same day, he wrote : " Mary's 
 love to all of you — I wouldn't let her write. Dear 
 Wordsworth, Mr. H — came out last night, and failed. 
 I had many fears ; the subject was not substantial 
 enough. John Bull must have solider fare than a 
 
56 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 letter. We are pretty stout about it ; have had plenty 
 of condoHng friends ; but, after all, we had rather it 
 should have succeeded. . . . The number of friends we 
 had in the house, my brother and I being in public 
 offices, &c., was astonishing ; but they yielded at length 
 to a few hisses. 
 
 ** A hundred hisses ! (Damn the word, I write it like 
 kisses — ^how different !) A hundred hisses outweigh a 
 thousand claps. The former come more directly from 
 the heart. Well, 'tis withdrawn, and there is an end. 
 Better luck to us." 
 
 And better luck did come. Only a month later, in 
 January 1807, Lamb had the pleasure of sending off a 
 present to Wordsworth ; to Wordsworth, who always 
 made a point of sending Lamb each " work " of his as 
 it came out : 
 
 ..." We have book'd off from the Swan and Two 
 Necks, Lad Lane, this day (per coach) the Tales from 
 Shakespeare, ..." 
 
 Charles himself was " answerable " for Lear, Macbeth, 
 Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, " for occasionally a 
 tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts 
 and all of the spelling. The rest is my sister's. We 
 think Pericles of hers is best, and Othello of mine." Even 
 the preface had been concocted between them : " My 
 part of the preface begins in the middle of a sentence in 
 last but one page, after a colon, thus : 
 
 ** : which if they be happily so done, &c. . . ." 
 
 As for the " cuts," over which Charles and Mary shook 
 their heads, they are of some interest to-day ; for they 
 were engraved by Blake, from designs by Mulready — 
 then a boy of twenty. And it was Mrs. Godwin, the 
 widow Clairmont, who was responsible for their selec- 
 tion ; she was, in fact, " Godwin's bookseller " at the 
 Juvenile Library. 
 
 Another joint work by the brother and sister was 
 
"BY CHARLES AND MARY LAMB" 57 
 
 published in this same year : Mrs. Leicester's School, 
 or the History of Several Young Ladies related hy 
 Themselves. Of these stories, only three, ** The Witch- 
 aunt," " First Going to Church," and " The Sea Voyage," 
 were written by Charles ; the others were by Mary Lamb ; 
 and of them to-day, perhaps the two that will be read 
 with most interest are *' The Young Mahometan " for its 
 autobiographic material, and "The Father's Wedding- 
 Day " for its inimitable sweet humour. Both of these 
 books, the Tales from Shakespeare, and Mrs, Leicester'' s 
 School, were to become at once popular. Both passed 
 into second and third, and subsequent editions. Mrs. 
 Leicester's School became a favourite book in many an 
 EngHsh schoolroom, and the Tales from Shakespeare 
 has long been a classic in our language. Thousands 
 of British children have sucked in their Shakespeare, 
 without knowing it, from these simple stories by Charles 
 and Mary Lamb. " There is indeed," says Canon 
 Ainger, " no better introduction to the study of Shak- 
 speare than these Tales — no better initiation into the 
 mind of Shakspeare, and into the subtleties of his 
 language and rhythm." 
 
 In 1808 Charles brought out two more books; his 
 Adventures of Ulysses for the Juvenile Library (intended 
 as an introduction to the reading of Telemachus), and 
 a more important work, his Specimens of English 
 Dramatic Poets who lived about the Time of Shake- 
 speare. And the year was an eventful one in other 
 ways. For on May-day 1808, Mary's friend, Sarah 
 Stoddart, married Charles's friend, WilHam Hazhtt ; 
 and they had met and fallen in love by Mary's fireside. 
 Many were the forebodings of friends on both sides — 
 afterwards justified — as to the wisdom of this union. 
 But it was no girl and boy marriage ; and " there was 
 love between them " — ^then, at least. 
 
 A quaint little wedding-group it must have been. 
 
58 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 on that May-day morning, at the church of St. Andrew's, 
 Holbom. Mary Lamb, for the occasion, blossomed out 
 into the character of bridesmaid ; and she seems to 
 have had considerable difficulty in making up her mind 
 whether to wear white musHn, or — which she greatly 
 preferred — a, certain silk dress of a '' dead-whiteish 
 bloom colour " that Manning had sent her all the way 
 from China. In her new dress (let us take it for granted 
 it was Manning's silk) Mary must have passed quite 
 close to her mother's grave in St. Andrew's churchyard, 
 where also her father and Aunt Hetty lay buried. And 
 poor Charles, in whose face his friends read always the 
 *' lines of old, unforgotten calamity " — ^as he stood in the 
 little group, watching the wedding ceremonial, was so 
 overcome with the incongruity, the unreality, of all 
 things, that he was seized with a desire to laicgh. The 
 same desire had once, he tells us, in the same way, 
 assailed him at a funeral ! 
 
 A year later, the Lambs were obliged to change their 
 lodgings, and they took chambers at No. 4 Inner Temple 
 Lane. As at every move. Lamb made the very best 
 of his new surroundings. Two rooms on the third floor, 
 and five rooms above, with an inner staircase, all new 
 painted, for £30 a year ! He meant, he told Manning, 
 to live and die in No. 4 Inner Temple Lane : 
 
 " Our place of final destination — I don't mean the 
 grave, but No. 4 Inner Temple Lane — ^looks out upon 
 a gloomy churchyard-like court, called Hare Court, 
 with three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it ? 
 I was bom near it, and used to drink at that pump when 
 I was a Rechabite of six years old." 
 
 Unfortunately, Mary's removal to Hoxton became 
 necessary before they had settled down in their new 
 abode. 
 
 "• What sad large pieces it cuts out of life ! out of 
 her life, who is getting rather old ; and we may not 
 
"BY CHARLES AND MARY LAMB" 59 
 
 have many years to live together. I am weaker, and 
 bear it worse than I ever did. But I hope we shall be 
 comfortable by and by. The rooms are delicious, and 
 the best look backwards into Hare Court, where there is 
 a pump always going. Just now it is dry. Hare Court 
 trees come in at the window, so that 'tis like Hving in a 
 garden. . . ." 
 
 Their third and last joint work, the Poetry for Children, 
 appeared in this year: "humble little poems," Lamb 
 called them, all on children's subjects, picked out by an 
 old bachelor and an old maid : " Many parents," he said 
 with pride, " would not have found so many." But 
 they had worked themselves out of children's subjects, 
 and were at a loss what to do next. " I am quite 
 aground for a plan," Charles wrote ; " but I must do 
 something for money." 
 
 Not that Lamb was in immediate want of money; 
 his salary at the India House had been raised, and the 
 books had brought enough " for a year or two to come." 
 But for Mary's sake Lamb looked ahead ; he had 
 ** prospective wants." 
 
 " Oh, money, money, how blindly thou hast been 
 worshipped, and how stupidly abused ! Thou art 
 health and hberty and strength ; and he that has thee 
 may rattle his pockets at the Devil." 
 
 In October 1809, Mary was recovered once more, 
 and she and Charles stayed with the HazHtts at their 
 cottage at Winterslow. They returned to town in ex- 
 cellent health and spirits ; had walked from eight to 
 twenty miles a day, in constant sunshine. "The 
 country," Lamb wrote to Coleridge, " has made us 
 whole." Back in the Temple, they were putting up 
 their bookshelves and arranging their Hogarth engrav- 
 ings on the walls : " Our Hogarth Room," Lamb loved 
 to call it. The water of the Hare Court pump had been 
 found "excellent cold with brandy" and "not very 
 
60 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 insipid without." So high were Lamb's spirits that he 
 was meditating a Uttle book for children on titles of 
 honour, and had prepared a Httle scale, " supposing 
 myself to receive the following various accessions of 
 dignity from the king, who is the fountain of honour," 
 and there follows the well-known scale of imaginary 
 honours, from " Mr. C. Lamb " upwards to " Pope 
 Innocent " — " higher than which is nothing upon earth." 
 And indeed, though for Charles and Mary there were 
 to be neither " king's honours " nor ecclesiastical 
 dignity, the years from 1809 to 1817, when they left 
 the Temple for ever, were perhaps their most brilliant 
 and prosperous years. They had many friends ; the 
 Leigh Hunts, and Grodwins, and Hazlitts ; the Randal 
 Norrises ; old Captain Bumey and his wife, the original 
 of Mrs. Battle ; and many more. And what a company 
 it was that met together on Wednesday evenings in 
 those high-up chambers in the Inner Temple ! The 
 furniture was old-fashioned ; the books were " ragged 
 veterans " ; the ceiUng was low. In the middle of the 
 room stood the old mahogany card-table, opened out, 
 with the little snuff-box set ready on it. On the side- 
 table were the cold meats and hot roasted potatoes, 
 the " vast jug of porter " from Fleet Street's " best 
 tap." And one by one they came ; those talkers, and 
 smokers, and " card-boys " ; the " Wednesday-men," 
 Charles Lamb's " friendly harpies," all more or less 
 famous men, then or afterwards ; and here and there aJso 
 a wife of one, a particular crony of Marj^'s, or a woman 
 of distinction, such as the actress Fanny Kelly, with the 
 *' divine plain face." There were the Bumeys, father 
 and son — ^who does not remember Lamb's impulsive 
 sally, " Martin, if dirt were trumps, what hands you'd 
 hold ! " and Barnes and Alsager, of the Times staff ; 
 Leigh Hunt, Godwin, and Hazlitt ; Ayrton, director 
 of music at the King's Theatre ; Rickman, clerk of the 
 
"BY CHARLES AND MARY LAMB" 61 
 
 House of Commons (originator of the census), " hugely 
 literate," " a finished man." There were Basil Montagu, 
 and Crabb Robinson, and Barron Field ; and on " great 
 extra nights " there would be Wordsworth or Coleridge. 
 
 What drew these people together under this roof, 
 high up in the Temple ? A small, spare man, in black, 
 with a head worthy of Aristotle, and a little gentle-faced 
 old maid in a rather extinguishing mob-cap ? " He 
 invited you suddenly," says Procter ; " not pressingly ; 
 but with such heartiness that you at once agreed to 
 come ; " and, when they did come, he gave them " his 
 outstretched hand, and his grave, sweet smile of wel- 
 come." Mary was there, moving about among her 
 guests, gently hospitable ; always with her peculiar 
 upward look at Charles, " as though to give him assur- 
 ance that all was then well with her" ; and Charles's 
 affection for her, " somewhat less on the surface," was 
 " always present." He was the lode-star of these 
 wonderful Wednesday evenings. " He always made the 
 best pun and the best remark in the course of the 
 evening. His serious conversation, Hke his serious 
 writing, is his best. No one ever stammered out such 
 fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things, in half-a-dozen 
 sentences, as he does. His jests scald like tears ; and 
 he probes a question with a play upon words." ^ 
 
 There was another, not quite so happy, visit to Win- 
 terslow in the autumn of 1810 ; and another visit to 
 Oxford, and the pictures at Blenheim. It was this visit 
 that suggested " Oxford in the Vacation " ; and Charles 
 and Mary and Hazlitt must together have watched 
 in that old college kitchen the " Spits that have cooked 
 for Chaucer." 
 
 Mary was again in the asylum later in that year ; but 
 Charles was writing a good deal through 1811. He 
 wrote for Leigh Hunt in the Reflector, and his Prince 
 
 1 Hazlitt. 
 
62 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 Dorus, and Beauty and the Beast were published by 
 *' Grodwin's bookseller." In 1813 he wrote the Prologue 
 for Coleridge's Remorse, which ran twenty nights at 
 Drury Lane ; and in 1814 he contributed the " Con- 
 fessions of a Drunkard " to Basil Montagu's Enquiries 
 into the Effects oj Fermented Liquors, and his article on 
 Wordsworth's Excursion (so cruelly mutilated by Gifford) 
 to the Quarterly Review, 
 
 It was in 1815 that Talfourd first met Charles Lamb. 
 Talfourd, the serjeant and judge, the original of 
 " Traddles " in David Copper field, was to become 
 Lamb's executor, and biographer, and devoted friend. 
 In 1815 he was a lad of nineteen, full of Hterary en- 
 thusiasm, and a pupil of the great Chitty, whose 
 chambers were on the next staircase to Lamb's, in 
 Inner Temple Lane. Talfourd had read some of 
 Lamb's verses, and searched the London bookstalls 
 for a copy of Rosamund Gray ; and when he found it, 
 in a httle shop in Holbom, his admiration for this 
 '' miniature romance " was such that his anxiety to see 
 its author " rose almost to the height of pain." 
 
 And then came an invitation from Mr. Evans of the 
 India House, who lived in Weymouth Street, " to meet 
 Mr. Charles Lamb " ; and one night about ten o'clock, 
 as soon as Talfourd could leave Chitty's ofiice, he walked 
 through a deep snow to Weymouth Street, and arrived 
 in time only to meet Lamb departing ! But in kindness 
 to the young hero-worshipper Lamb stayed for half an 
 hour longer ; and then together, through the winter 
 night, they walked back to their "common home," the 
 Temple. Twenty years of intimacy were to follow this 
 meeting. " Who shall describe his countenance," wrote 
 Talfourd, remembering this first sight of him, " catch 
 its quivering sweetness, and fix it for ever in words ? " 
 
 Mr. Evans was the proprietor of the Pamphleteer, and 
 Talfourd straightway wrote an essay for it in which 
 
THE "LONDON MAGAZINE" 63 
 
 Lamb appeared as one of the Chief of Living Poets. 
 Lamb was delighted ; he had never been so praised 
 before. And not long afterwards, knowing very well 
 what would please the boy, he arrived in Chitty's office, 
 almost breathless, to ask " Mr. Talfourd " to meet 
 '' Mr. Wordsworth," who was in London, and actually 
 at that very moment in Lamb's parlour, next door ! 
 Talfourd hurried out with his " kind conductor," and 
 a moment later was presented to Wordsworth, with the 
 preface, " Wordsworth, give me leave to introduce to you 
 my only admirer, ^^ 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE "LONDON MAGAZINE" 
 
 The Wednesday evenings in the Temple came to a 
 sudden end in 1817. Mary's more frequent attacks of 
 insanity, and absences from home, Lamb's restless 
 inabihty to do hterary work with so many " friendly 
 harpies " about him, pointed to the wisdom of a change 
 of abode. The " Knocketemals," as he called his 
 nightly visitors, were dear to him ; but he was " over- 
 companied." He was never " C. L,", but always 
 " C. L. & Co." It was a wonderful week in which he 
 could get two evenings, or even one, to himself. He 
 was, in fact, never alone, except on his morning walks 
 to the India House, which were, for that reason, like 
 " treading on sands of gold." 
 
 And so the brother and sister took down the Hogarths 
 from their walls, and said good-bye to the Temple for 
 ever : "It was an ugly wrench — but, like a tooth, now 
 'tis out, and I am easy." Their choice fell on cheer- 
 ful, if somewhat noisy, lodgings, over a brazier's shop 
 in Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, at the corner 
 of Bow Street, where Will's Coffee House once stood. 
 
 E 
 
64 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 *' We are in the individual spot I like best in all this 
 great city," wrote the optimistic Lamb. *' The theatres, 
 with all their noises ; Covent Garden, dearer to me than 
 any gardens of Alcinous, where we are morally sure of 
 the earliest peas and 'sparagus. Bow Street, where 
 the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary 
 had not been here f our-and-twenty hours before she saw 
 a thief. . . ." 
 
 It was a change ; a kind of holiday in London. Mary 
 could sit all day with her sewing at the window — looking 
 out for thieves — while Charles was at the India House ; 
 and, in the evening, after their simple meal together, 
 they could go to the pit at Drury Lane, or take a stroll 
 past all the theatre doors. When Mary kept well, they 
 forgot they had ever been " assailable." They were 
 " strong for the time as rocks. The wind is tempered 
 to the shorn Lambs." 
 
 For six years, from 1817 to 1823, those noisy lodgings 
 in Covent Garden remained their headquarters. In 
 summer, they turned countrjrwards ; usually to Dalston, 
 which was not the Dalston of to-day, but a place where 
 they walked in meadows and picked primroses ; '' and 
 Mary corrects me when I call 'em cowslips." And they 
 made other httle jaunts, to the sea at Hastings, and once 
 or twice to Cambridge ; and once, when Charles was 
 seized with a desire for foreign travel, even as far as 
 Paris and Versailles. They ate frogs, met Talma, who 
 thought Lamb " a great rogue " ; and they were towed 
 round Paris by their young American friend, Howard i 
 Pajme, the man who wrote the libretto of Clari, the 
 Maid of Milan y and has been called the " homeless 
 author of * Home, sweet Home.' " But on the occasion* 
 of this visit to Paris, they took the precaution of travel-' 
 ling with a nurse for Mary ; and Mary herself carefully; 
 packed her strait-jacket, in case it should be required. 
 And if report says true, it was required ; and Charles 
 
THE ''LONDON MAGAZINE" 65 
 
 was obliged to leave Mary behind at Amiens, with the 
 nurse and Crabb Robinson, and return alone to his desk 
 at the India House. 
 
 It was not till August 1820 that Charles Lamb began 
 to write for the London Magazine — those essays over 
 the magic signature *' EHa," which more than anything 
 else have earned for him his place in EngHsh Hterature. 
 
 The London was a new magazine, started in January 
 1820, with a brilhant Httle band of contributors under 
 the clever editorship of John Scott. Hazhtt, who 
 introduced Lamb to the magazine, Gary, the " Dante 
 man," Allan Cunningham, Bernard Barton, the young 
 Thomas Carlyle, Savage Landor, Procter (Barry Corn- 
 wall), De Quincey, Keats, Tom Hood, and the afterwards 
 notorious criminal Wainewright (the Janus Weathercock 
 of its pages) all wrote for the London Magazine, The 
 pay was good — a pound a page for print, and two 
 pounds for poetry — but, according to Procter, Lamb 
 received " two or three times the amount the others 
 did " for his Essays of Elia, In the summer of 1821 
 John Scott, having involved himself in a bitter pen- 
 and-ink quarrel with Blackwood's Magazine, fought a 
 duel " in the uncertain gUmmer of moonHght " at the 
 back of Chalk Farm (which really was a farm in 1821), 
 and met his death " from the hand of one who went 
 out resolved not to harm him." The London Magazine 
 was taken over by Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who 
 edited it themselves, employing Tom Hood as their 
 versatile sub-editor, and gave their memorable monthly 
 dinners to the staff in their offices in Waterloo Place. 
 
 Lamb himself tells how he came to use the name of 
 Elia : " Call it Ellia*' he says ; and so Ellia it must be 
 pronounced. It belonged to an Italian clerk in the 
 old South Sea House, with whom Lamb worked when 
 he was there as a boy, and whom he had met from time 
 to time ever since. Lamb borrowed the name as a 
 
66 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 sort of practical joke; and one day in 1821, not having 
 seen the real Elia for about a year, he called on him, 
 *' to laugh over with him my usurpation of liis name, 
 and found him, alas ! no more than a name ; for he 
 died of consumption eleven months ago, and I knew 
 not of it." Lamb kept the name ; it has become, indeed, 
 his very own. For Charles Lamb and EHa, the essayist 
 and the man, are one and indivisible. 
 
 The "South Sea House," "Oxford in the Vaca- 
 tion," " Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," 
 " The Two Races of Men," all appeared in the London 
 Magazine in the latter half of 1820. " Mackery End," 
 " Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," " My First Play," 
 "My Relations," "The Old Benchers of the Inner 
 Temple," were among the contributions of 1821 ; and 
 every month of every year — ^the magazine lived for 
 five years — ^brought with it one or more of the im- 
 mortal essays, running the whole gamut of Elia's ex- 
 cellences, grave and gay, from his " Dream-Children," 
 and " Old China," and "Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire," 
 to his "Jews, Quakers, and Scotchmen," and his 
 *' Dissertation on Roast Pig." 
 
 And what had the elder brother, John, been doing 
 all these years ? John Lamb had become " the Ajax 
 Telamon of the slender clerks of the old South Sea 
 House." Robust and prosperous always, he had lived 
 his own easy-going life ; had married a wife, a widow ; 
 picked up, or pleased himself with thinking he had, 
 several good things in the way of old masters, and 
 watched with some amusement the career of his Hterary 
 younger brother. The clerks at the ojB&ce told him 
 that Charles was growing famous ! John's tastes were 
 not hterary; but he seems to have perpetrated a 
 ** Work on Humanity," and he took it to Charles in the 
 belief that Charles could "get it into all the reviews 
 at a moment's notice." 
 
THE "LONDON MAGAZINE" 67 
 
 '' I ! ! " says Charles, " who have been set up as a 
 mark for them to throw at, and would willingly consign 
 them all to Megsera's snaky locks." 
 
 John was not averse from dropping in on Charles's 
 Wednesday evenings at the Temple ; Talf ourd re- 
 members him there : " John Lamb, the jovial and 
 burly, who dared to argue with Hazlitt on questions of 
 art." 
 
 As for Charles, he had always revered his brother — 
 and always seen through him. He once wrote a sonnet 
 to John : 
 
 ** John, you were figuring in the gay career 
 Of blooming manhood with a young man's joy, 
 When I was yet a little peevish boy — 
 Though time has made the difierence disappear 
 Betwixt our ages, which then seemed so great — 
 And still by rightful custom you retain 
 Much of the old authoritative strain, 
 And keep the elder brother up in state." 
 
 And of course John figured in one of the early Essays 
 ofElia, " My Relations," which appeared in the London 
 in June 1821 : 
 
 ** It does me good, as I walk towards the street of my 
 daily avocation, on some fine May morning, to meet him 
 marching in a quite opposite direction, with a jolly, 
 handsome presence and shining, sanguine face, that 
 indicates some purchase in his eye — a Claude — or a 
 Hobbima — for much of his enviable leisure is consumed 
 at Christie's and Philhps's — or where not, to pick up 
 pictures and such gauds. On these occasions he mostly 
 stoppeth me, to read a short lecture on the advantage 
 a person hke me possesses above himself, in having 
 his time occupied with business which he must do — 
 assureth me that he often feels it hang heavy on his 
 hands — ^wishes he had fewer hohdays, and goes off — 
 Westward Ho !— chanting a tune, to Pall Mall—perfectly 
 
68 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 convinced that he has convinced me — ^while I proceed in 
 my opposite direction, tuneless." 
 
 Once, at least, John Lamb did pick up a picture of 
 value: "An undoubtable picture of Milton," wrote 
 Charles to Wordsworth — evidently " the original of the 
 heads in the Tonson editions." John gave a few shillings 
 for it ; he " could get no history with it but that some 
 old lady had had it for a great many years." And 
 when John Lamb died, which he did in November 1821, 
 he left to Charles, who was his executor, this Milton 
 portrait. 
 
 In 1821 Lamb was growing ominously tired of " official 
 confinement," and " a certain deadness to everything " 
 followed on the death of his brother. He sat, he told 
 Wordsworth, " like Philomel all day (but not singing), 
 with my breast against this thorn of a desk." 
 
 In the winter that followed — ^the winter of 1821-2 — 
 dozing in his bachelor arm-chair with Mary at his side, 
 he dreamed of things as they might have been. '' My 
 little ones," " dream-children," stood at his knees ; and 
 he was telling them about their old great-grandmother 
 Field ; and about their Uncle John — such a handsome, 
 spirited youth, "^ a king to the rest of us " — and how, when 
 he died, *' though he had not been dead an hour, it 
 seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance 
 there is betwixt life and death ; and how I bore his 
 death as I thought pretty well at first, but afterwards 
 it haunted and haunted me. ... I missed him all day 
 long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him. 
 I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and 
 wished him to be ahve again, to be quarrelling with 
 him. . . ." 
 
 And then the dream-children, Httle John, and Alice 
 with the fair hair, begged for some stories about " their 
 pretty dead mother." 
 
 ** Then I told how for seven long years, in hope 
 
A SUPERANNUATED MAN 69 
 
 sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, 
 I courted the fair Alice W — n ; and, as much as children 
 could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and 
 difficulty, and denial, meant in maidens — when suddenly 
 turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at 
 her eyes with such a reahty of re-presentment, that I 
 became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or 
 whose that bright hair was. ..." 
 
 And the dream-children faded. " We are not of 
 Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The 
 children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing ; 
 less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what 
 might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores 
 of Lethe millions of ages, before we have existence, and 
 a name. . . ." ^ 
 
 Did Mr. and Mrs. Bartrum take in the London 
 Magazine ? And if so, what did Mr. Bartrum think of 
 the reference to himself in this particular number ? And 
 did the blue eyes of Anna, who was the mother of up- 
 growing Bartrums, suffuse over poor Charles Lamb's 
 " Dream-Children " ? Perhaps people had told her — 
 as the clerks of the old South Sea House had told John 
 — that " Charles Lamb was growing famous." The Uttle 
 romance of their youth was an old story now ! 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 A STJPERANNTJATED MAN 
 
 Dtjbing one of their visits to Cambridge, at the house 
 of their friend Mrs, Paris, Charles and Mary had made 
 the acquaintance of Emma Isola. No dream-child was 
 this, with the blue eyes and fair hair, but a vivacious 
 little creature with rich Southern colouring : 
 
 " And Emma brown, exuberant in talk." 
 ^ " Dream-Children," Essays of Elia. 
 
70 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 She was an orphan ; her grandfather, Agostino 
 Isola, an ItaHan refugee, had taught ItaHan at Cam- 
 bridge to — among other people — "Mr. Pitt," the poet 
 Gray, and the poet Wordsworth ; and Charles Isola, 
 her father, had been one of the " Esquire bedells " of 
 the university. Emma was at school near Cambridge, 
 and when the Lambs first saw her was spending her 
 hohdays with an aunt, in Mrs. Paris's house. Charles 
 and Mary took an extraordinary liking to the child, 
 and on her next holidays they " begged her of her aunt." 
 From that time forward Emma Isola spent all her 
 holidays with the Lambs in London; and when she 
 left school they adopted her as a daughter. " Our 
 Emma," Charles calls her in his letters : " Emma, our 
 nut-brown maid " ; ''a girl of gold." She called them 
 ** Uncle" and "Aunt," and came and went, making 
 their lives bright with her youth and gaiety. Perhaps 
 it was with Emma's visits in view, for the lodgings over 
 the brazier's shop in Co vent Garden were circumscribed 
 as well as noisy, that Charles and Mary decided once 
 again to change their abode. 
 
 " I have a cottage in Colebrook Row, Islington," 
 wrote Lamb to Bernard Barton in September 1823 : 
 *' a cottage, for it is detached ; a white house, with six 
 good rooms ; the New River (rather elderly by this 
 time) runs (if a moderate walking pace may be so 
 termed) close to the front of the house ; and behind is a 
 spacious garden with vines (I assure you), pears, straw- 
 berries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight 
 the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without passage 
 into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and 
 rough with old books ; and above is a Hghtsome 
 drawing-room, three windows, full of choice prints. I 
 feel like a great lord, never having had a house before." 
 
 There were drawbacks. Poor George Dyer — soberest 
 of men, but absent-minded and without his spectacles, 
 
A SUPERANNUATED MAN 71 
 
 on the very first occasion when he called on Mary Lamb, 
 in the broad light of day, on his way to dine with Mrs. 
 V Barbauld (what could be more respectable?) walked 
 Straight out of Mary's parlour into the New River. 
 He was pulled out, wrapped in hot blankets, and made 
 deUrious with brandy and water; and in this plight 
 Charles found his old friend on his own return from the 
 India House. It was excellent " copy " for Charles ; 
 and the whole incident appeared in his next essay, 
 *' Amicus Redivivus," in the London Magazine. 
 
 But, on the whole, though there was a good deal of 
 talk about the advisabihty of putting up palings, 
 LamVs " friendly harpies " took kindly to Colebrook 
 Cottage. They called it " Petty Venice," and found 
 their way out to it often enough, though in those days 
 they were obHged to walk. One of them speaks of the 
 friendly gatherings there, calling it a house of call for 
 all denominations, where all differences were left with 
 the walking-sticks inside the front door. Wordsworth 
 and his sister Dorothy stayed with the Lambs there, 
 Tom Hood, on his first visit to Lamb, found them there, 
 sitting with Charles and Mary by the " domestic hearth." 
 And Tom Hood, though as he says " I have never made 
 Bozziness my business," remembers that they talked 
 about the younger poets of their day, and that Words- 
 worth upheld Shelley, while Lamb preferred Keats. 
 
 In that year, 1823, one or two things happened to 
 Charles Lamb besides the move into Colebrook Row. 
 He saw his Essays of Elia published in volume form by 
 Taylor and Hessey ; he made his Will ; and he quarrelled 
 with Southey. The volume of essays did not sell very 
 quickly. The Will was a highly satisfactory transac- 
 tion ; it left all his property in trust for Mary, and named 
 three willing trustees — ^his friends Allsop, Talfourd, and 
 Procter. The quarrel with Southey, on the other hand, 
 was a heartrending affair. For Southey had attacked 
 
72 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 Elia, " on the score of infidelity," in an article in the 
 Quarterly; and the Quarterly had already been un- 
 friendly towards Lamb. Gifford had mutilated Lamb's 
 own article in it about Wordsworth's Excursion ; and 
 there had also been the allusion in its pages to Lamb's 
 Confessions of a Drunkard, as a " genuine description of 
 the state of the writer." 
 
 '' Little things that are not ill-meant," wrote Lamb to 
 Southey, " may produce much ill. That might have 
 injured me alive and dead. I am in a pubUc office, and 
 my life is insured." 
 
 But Southey's article on the Progress of Infidelity had 
 attacked not only Lamb, but Lamb's friends Leigh Hunt 
 and Hazlitt ; and, hurt and indignant, Lamb sent a 
 letter to the London Magazine : " Letter of Elia to 
 Robert Southey, Esq.," which may be read in Canon 
 Ainger's edition of his works. Mary knew nothing 
 about this letter till it had come out : " My guardian 
 angel was absent at that time." She was very sorry, 
 Southey was very sorry, and Lamb was quickly sorry 
 and ashamed ; he never could be incensed for very long. 
 
 " The kindness of your note," he wrote to Southey 
 in November 1823, " has melted away the mist which 
 was upon me. I have been fighting against a shadow." 
 
 Lideed Lamb could afford to set aside even the 
 Progress of Infidehty in the Quarterly Review, He was 
 at the zenith of his fortunes — ^the hero of the London 
 Magazine, and one of the chief clerks in the East India 
 House. 
 
 If Charles Lamb felt like a " great lord " in the little 
 cottage in Colebrook Row, Mary, in her mob-cap, sitting 
 opposite to him on the domestic hearth, must assuredly 
 have felt like a great lady. There is no happier ghmpse 
 of their companionship together than in the essay " Old 
 China," published in the London Magazine in March 
 1823. Then, brother and sister were no longer poor: 
 
A SUPERANNUATED MAN 73 
 
 they had " money enough and to spare," and could 
 look back affectionately on the " good old times " in 
 Mitre Court, when they were obliged to *' cut closer." 
 
 "Do you remember," says Mary (the "Bridget EHa" 
 of this essay), " the brown suit, which you made to hang 
 upon you, tiH all your friends cried shame upon you, 
 it grew so threadbare — and aU because of that folio 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late 
 at night from Barker's in Co vent Garden ? " And 
 " do you remember " the evenings at the theatre, when 
 " we squeezed out our shiUings apiece to sit three or 
 four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery . . . and 
 when the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place 
 in the house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, 
 when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or 
 with Viola at the Court of lUyria ? " 
 
 Now, they did not sit in the galleries ; and sometimes 
 Mary sat at home, while Charles represented Literature 
 at a City banquet : 
 
 " I had the honour of dining at the Mansion House on 
 Thursday last by special card from the Lord Mayor, who 
 never saw my face nor I his ; and aU from being a writer 
 in a magazine. The dinner costly, served on massy plate ; 
 champagne, pines, &c. ; 47 present, among whom the 
 Chairman and two other directors of the Lidia Company. 
 
 *' There's for you ! and got awa^ pretty sober. Quite 
 saved my credit ! . o ." 
 
 But winter was always a great trial to Charles Lamb ; 
 and that winter of 1823-4 and all the following year 
 he was in poor health and spirits, and complaining that 
 he could not write ; though one of his most beautiful 
 essays, his " Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire," did appear 
 in the London Magazine for September 1824. In 
 November — a very wet November — ^Mary was going 
 ** puddling about shopping after a gown for the winter," 
 and Charles was moping at his office desk " by candle- 
 
74 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 light — most melancholy." When Procter married Basil 
 Montagu's step-daughter, "the pretty Anne Skepper," 
 Lamb wrote his whimsical letter of congratulation. He 
 was married himself to a severe step- wife, " the d — d 
 Day-hag Business " : " She is even now peeping over 
 me to see I am writing no love letters. I come, my 
 dear. Where is the Indigo Sale Book ? . . ." 
 
 Charles Lamb's freedom was nearer at hand than he 
 supposed. He was only fifty, though he had been three 
 and thirty years at the desk. Life had held for him 
 bitterer experiences than most men are called upon to 
 bear. Care had dogged his footsteps ever since he was a 
 boy of twenty — ^walking almost abreast of him. There can 
 be no conception of the wear and tear, to a temperament 
 like Charles Lamb's, of those long years of self-imposed 
 duty, of Mary's constantly recurring attacks of madness 
 and periods of dull depression. Everything was sub- 
 servient to Mary's mental condition : he was always on 
 the watch. It is said that if the talk became too ex- 
 citing, he would turn the subject suddenly, or quietly 
 and quickly dismiss his guests ; he has been known, in 
 the midst of friendly converse round the fireside — seeing 
 some subtle change come over Mary's face, unnoticed 
 by the rest — ^to Hft the kettle from the hob and hold it 
 for a moment over Mary's cap — ^to startle her back to 
 sanity. 
 
 He was beginning to feel " ominously tired," and to 
 show it. His " spring of mind," says Procter, was 
 beginning to " lose its power of rebound." It is not 
 much to be wondered at that after office hours, in the 
 little home so often now left desolate, his pipe and his 
 glass were his most comfortable companions ; and in 
 his weakness of habit he stretched out his hand almost 
 unconsciously towards *' the cup that shall be death in 
 tasting." And while the thoughts in that '' amazingly 
 fine head '^ were still lovely and of good report, those 
 
A SUPERANNUATED MAN 75 
 
 almost immaterial legs — in the gaiters that " seemed 
 longing for something more substantial to close in " — 
 were sometimes a little unsteady. His best friends 
 realised that it was time Charles Lamb retired; and 
 some of them had been quietly acting in his behalf. 
 Early in 1825, he wrote in strict confidence to Manning — 
 now back from the East with a long white beard and 
 eccentric, oriental ways — ^that his old friend Dr. Tuthill 
 of Cavendish Square had been to see him, and was able 
 to certify him as TioTi-capacitated, if not m-capacitated, 
 for business. Not without fear and trembling was 
 Lamb prevailed on to send in his resignation to the 
 directors of the India House, and to await the result. 
 In those three and thirty years, he had stepped gradually 
 up in their service till his clerkship was bringing him a 
 salary of nearly £700 a year. But clerks of the India 
 House held their posts for more than three and thirty 
 years. He waited anxiously — the days seemed like 
 months — ^and every day he went and came, sitting at his 
 old desk, just as if nothing were going to happen. And 
 then one day they sent for him. Who does not re- 
 member that passage in his essay " The Superannuated 
 Man " ? 
 
 " A week passed in this manner — ^the most anxious 
 one I verily beheve in my whole life — when on the 
 evening of the 12th of April, just as I was about quitting 
 my desk to go home (it might be about eight o'clock), I 
 received an awful summons to attend the presence of 
 the whole assembled firm in the formidable back-parlour. 
 I thought now my time is surely come, I have done for 
 myseK, I am going to be told that they have no longer 
 occasion for me. L — , I could see, smiled at the terror I 
 was in, which was a Httle rehef to me — when to my 
 utter astonishment B — , the eldest partner, began a 
 formal harangue to me on the length of my services, my 
 very meritorious conduct during the whole of the time 
 
V 
 
 76 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 (the deuce, thought I, how did he find out that ? I 
 protest I never had the confidence to think as much). 
 He went on to descant on the expediency of retiring at a 
 certain time of hfe (how my heart panted !), and asking 
 me a few questions as to the amount of my own property, 
 of which I have a Httle, ended with a proposal, to which 
 his three partners nodded a grave assent, that I should 
 accept from the house which I had served so well, a 
 pension for life to the amount of two-thirds of my 
 accustomed salary — a magnificent offer ! I do not know 
 what I answered between surprise and gratitude, but 
 it was understood that I accepted their proposal, and I 
 was told that I was free from that hour to leave their 
 ser\ice. I stammered out a bow, and at just ten minutes 
 after eight, I went home — ^for ever." 
 
 It was to Wordsworth that Lamb wrote, first of all, 
 to tell the wonderful news : 
 
 " I came home for ever on Tuesday in last week. . . . 
 The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed 
 me. It was Hke passing from life into eternity. ..." 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 PASSr^G THE LOVE OF WOMEN 
 
 The ** Eternity " was to last nine years. At first, 
 Lamb went about as if the sun were in his eyes. The 
 sense of relief, and freedom, and perpetual " holydays " 
 fairly dazzled him. Four hundred and fifty a year, with 
 nine pounds a year deducted towards Mary's pension 
 in case she should outlive him, Mary taking the position 
 ordinarily accorded by the Company to a wife ! It was 
 stupendous. Charles walked the fair earth, and he 
 had nothing to do except to walk, no longer as *' Mr. 
 Lamb of the India House." He was '' Retired Leisure." 
 
PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN 77 
 
 All days were " holydays " ; he revelled in idleness. " If 
 I had a Httle son, I would christen him ' Nothing-to- 
 do.' He should do nothing. Man, I verily beHeve, 
 is out of his element as long as he is operative. , I am 
 altogether for the life contemplative." As for Mary, 
 poor soul, " Mary awakes every morning with an obscure 
 feeling that some good has happened to us." 
 t And yet — ^was it good ? For Charles Lamb, tired at 
 \ fifty, was not of a temperament that plays with credit the 
 r61e of Retired Leisure. There came the reaction — ^the 
 inevitable discovery that all hoHdays were no hohdays ; 
 the wistf^L^ceaiKing for the old desk and stool and the 
 chit-chat of the fellow-clerks. Above all there came 
 the cry of a ^tless soul: "I cannot sit and think." 
 The routine of the desk, the obligations of service, had 
 been the saving of Charles Lamb, without his knowing 
 it. Or perhaps he did know it. " These are my real 
 works," he used to say, pointing to the big ledgers in 
 the India House. 
 
 In summer he took lodgings for Mary and himself, at 
 Enfield — coaches ran twice a week to Enfield in those 
 days. They took long country walks together; Mary 
 could stiU walk her dozen miles in a day. Tom Hood 
 gave Charles a big dog; but Dash (the friendly 
 harpies used to say he ought to have been called 
 Rover) was always running away ; and poor Charles, 
 in his character of Retired Leisure, was quite unable to 
 run after Dash. His friends used to meet him in the 
 inner circle of the Regent's Park, patiently waiting at a 
 gap in the palings where Dash had last disappeared, 
 because Dash always came back again, if you waited 
 long enough. 
 
 The brightest thing in all these superannuated years 
 was Euama Isola, the " girl of gold." There is a pretty 
 ghmpse of her in Lamb's little sonnet *' Harmony in 
 Unhkeness," written when Emma and her particular 
 
78 CHARLES"^ LAMB 
 
 school-friend were keeping him company, during one of 
 Mary's many absences from home. 
 
 " By Enfield lanes, and Winchmore's verdant hill, 
 Two lovely damsels cheer my lonely walk : 
 The fair Maria, as a vestal^ still ; 
 And Emma brown, exuberant in talk. 
 With soft and lady speech the first applies 
 The mild correctives that to grace belong 
 To her redundant friend, who her defies 
 With jest, and mad discourse, and bursts of song. 
 O differing pair, yet sweetly thus agreeing, 
 What music from your happy discord rises ! 
 While your companion, hearing each, and seeing, 
 Nor this, nor that, but both together, prizes ; 
 This lesson teaching, which our souls may strike, 
 That harmonies may be in things unlike ! " 
 
 In 1827 the cottage in Colebrook Eow was given up, 
 and the Lambs took a house in Enfield Chase, a " gam- 
 bogey-looking cottage," with four poplars in front of it. 
 
 " I am settled for life, I hope, at Enfield. I have 
 taken the prettiest, compacted house I ever saw." 
 
 A schoolboy living next door happened to see the 
 Lambs when they came to look over this house : 
 
 *' Leaning idly out of a window, I saw a group of 
 three issuing from the gambogey-looking cottage close 
 at hand — 3, slim, middle-aged man in quaint uncon- 
 temporary habiliments, a rather shapeless bundle of 
 an old lady in a bonnet like a mob-cap, and a young 
 girl ; while before them bounded a riotous dog, holding 
 a board with ' This House to Let ' on it in his jaws. 
 Lamb was on his way back to the house-agents, and 
 that was his fashion of announcing that he had taken 
 the premises.'* 
 
 Charles and Mary had decided that Emma Isola 
 must be fitted to earn her own living, in case she did not 
 marry ; and so Charles gave her lessons in Latin, and 
 Mary worked at French in order to read French with 
 Emma. The girl was full of the joy of life ; Charles 
 
PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN 79 
 
 was obliged to keep her sitting, during those Latin 
 lessons, with her back to the window, because she wanted 
 always to be jumping up and looking out ; and even 
 with her back turned she seemed to see what was 
 passing, through the comers of her dark eyes. But 
 she did learn : ''I have made her a tolerable Latinist,'* 
 Lamb told Procter in 1829. And she taught Charles 
 ^and Mary her own Italian language ; and together, this 
 quaint trio, they " scrambled through the Inferno, ^^ 
 In the company of strangers she was a silent girl ; she 
 was very silent when Savage Landor called on Lamb. 
 Many of Lamb's friends knew her only as "a silent 
 brown girl " who rambled about his house during the 
 holidays. But she shared the theatre-visits and all 
 the other Httle gaieties that Charles and Mary could 
 afford. " May we venture to bring Emma with us ? " 
 Lamb wrote, when Mary and he were invited to dine 
 with Coleridge and the Gillmans at Highgate; and it 
 was on the return journey by coach that Lamb replied 
 to the conductor's " All full inside ? " with his " I cannot 
 answer for the other ladies and gentlemen, but that last 
 piece of Mrs. Gillman's pudding did for me ! " " Emma's 
 Album," too, became one of their household gods ; all 
 Lamb's best Hterary visitors were expected to write 
 something in " Emma's Album." And Emma, as be- 
 fitted the adopted daughter of a literary household, 
 had tried her own hand at verses. 
 
 *' What to call 'em, I don't know," wrote Lamb to 
 Tom Hood. ** Blank verse they are not, because of the 
 rhymes ; rhyme they are not, because of the blank verse ; 
 heroics they are not, because they are lyviG ; Ijoics they 
 are not, because of the heroic measure. They must be 
 caird EmmaicsJ^ 
 
 And then, of course, the inevitable happened : " Moxon 
 has fallen in love with Emma, our nut-brown maid." 
 
 Edward Moxon, the young pubhsher, clever, am- 
 
 p 
 
80 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 bitious, and poor — " that pleasant rogue Moxon," as 
 Lamb calls him, was six and twenty when Emma Isola 
 was eighteen. Moxon had worked his way steadily 
 upward from the day in 1817 when he had come to 
 London to find employment in a bookseller's shop. 
 He had been with Longman, and Lamb had recom- 
 mended him to Colbum, and then he had become 
 Hurst's Hterary adviser ; and in the meantime he had 
 fallen in love with Emma. Emma, with her httle 
 capital of languages and music, had found a situation 
 as governess in a Suffolk rectory, where she was treated 
 like a daughter of the house by the good parson and his 
 whole family. It was here that Emma was very ill, 
 and the rector's wife nursed her so carefully ; and 
 Charles and Mary at Enfield were shaken by anxiety 
 until their nut-brown maid was pronounced out of 
 danger. Lamb himself, very shaky still, went by coach 
 to fetch her home again. On the return journey Lamb 
 made Emma laugh by his answer to the " well-informed 
 man " who had plied him with so many troublesome 
 questions. " What sort of a crop of turnips do you 
 think we shall have this year ? " their fellow-traveller 
 had asked poHtely. " It depends," Lamb replied with 
 the utmost gravity, " I beUeve, on boiled legs of 
 mutton." 
 
 When the gambogey house became too much for 
 Mary to look after, they went into lodgings again, next 
 door — " forty-two inches nearer to London," And for 
 a time Charles took rooms in town, and worked at the 
 British Museum, making extracts for Hone's Every-Day 
 Booh, He liked the regular work. It was almost as 
 good as being at the India House again. And he 
 wrote his " Popular Fallacies " for the New Monthly 
 Magazine, the London Magazine being now defunct, and 
 amused himself with album- verses. It was the age of 
 Albums and Annuals, Gems, and Forget-me-nots, and 
 
PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN 81 
 
 what not. The editor of the Gem refused his " Gipsy's 
 Malison," as calculated to " shock all mothers " ; but 
 it was accepted by Maga ; and surely Lamb never wrote 
 anjrthing more passionately human than these hnes : 
 
 " Suck, baby, suck, mother's love grows by giving. 
 Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting ; 
 Black manhood comes^ when riotous guilty living 
 Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting. 
 
 Kiss, baby, kiss ; mother s lips shine by kisses, 
 Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings ; 
 Black manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses 
 Tend thee the kiss that poisons 'mid caressings. 
 
 Hang, baby, hang, mother's love loves such forces, 
 Strain the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging. 
 Black manhood comes, when violent lawless courses 
 Leaves thee a spectacle in rude air swinging.' 
 
 When, in 1830, Moxon, with a sum of £500 lent him 
 by his Maecenas, the poet Samuel Rogers, started 
 in business for himself in New Bond Street, the first 
 book he pubhshed was a collection of Lamb's Album 
 Verses, with Lamb's own dedication to the young pub- 
 lisher ; and Satan in Search of a Wife followed it in 
 183L Two years later, Moxon pubhshed the Last 
 Essays of Elia ; and these were issued from Moxon's 
 new shop, the " Murray-hke shop," as Lamb proudly 
 called it, in Dover Street. There was nothing now to 
 hinder the young people's marrying. Emma had been 
 introduced to Samuel Rogers — ^who had " smiled ap- 
 proval " ; and Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, " I 
 am about to lose my old and only walk-companion, 
 whose mirthful spirits were the youth of our house. . . . 
 With my perfect approval and more than concurrence 
 she is to be wedded to Moxon, at the end of August. . . . 
 So ' perish the roses and the flowers ' — how is it ? " 
 
82 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 And in the same letter he asks Wordsworth to forgive 
 him if he changes his mind and gives the Milton 
 portrait to Emma, as " part-portion," instead of leaving 
 it to Wordsworth as he had always intended to do.^ 
 It was to hang in Moxon's " Murray-like shop." I^mb 
 could think of Uttle else now but Emma, and the wedding. 
 It was a happy coincidence that Emtoia's " silk dress " 
 came home at the identical time that Talfourd, too, 
 " took silk." 
 
 Even the Enfield lodgings were given up now. The 
 furniture, all except the old bookcase that held the 
 " ragged veterans," was sold. Mary was in a pitiable 
 condition, worse than she had ever been before. Charles 
 reahsed sadly that Mary was no longer fit to live with 
 him, " So I am come to hve with her," he wrote. Brother 
 and sister were in a Uttle cottage in Edmonton, belonging 
 to a Mr. and Mrs. Walden, " who take in patients, and 
 have arranged to lodge and board us only." 
 
 To this little house, after the wedding in London 
 was over, and that pleasant rogue Moxon had carried 
 Emma off with him to Paris, poor Charles returned 
 alone. Mrs. Walden had done a clever thing in his 
 absence. Taking a glass of wine in her hand, she had 
 looked at Mary Lamb. " Let us drink to the health 
 of Mr. and Mrs. Moxon," she said, and behold ! the words 
 acted hke an electric shock. In that moment, Mary was 
 restored to her senses. . . . 
 
 " Never was such a calm, or such a recovery," wrote 
 Lamb to the bridal pair in Paris. That evening " we " 
 played seven games of picquet together. "We attack 
 Tasso soon." 
 
 The months that followed were rather dull without 
 
 Emma ; but Lamb kept a brave front. " Tell Emma I 
 
 every day love her more and miss her less." He bore 
 
 his privations " pretty well." He saw the Moxona 
 
 ^ Now in the National Portrait Grallery. 
 
PASSING THE LOVE OF WOMEN 83 
 
 " pretty often." *' It is no new thing for me to be left 
 with my sister. When she is not violent, her rambling 
 chat is better to me than the sense and sanity of this 
 world." 
 
 Some of the old friends came about him ; Talfourd, 
 Crabb Robinson, Gary, and old George Dyer. And he 
 was still able to walk. Always now, along the road " dear 
 Londonwards." " Fields, flowers, birds, and green 
 lanes, I have no heart for. The bare road is cheerful, 
 and almost as good as a street. I saunter into the Red 
 Lion. . . ." Indeed, he had long been used to think 
 of the roadside inns as milestones — he would say he had 
 " walked a pint." 
 
 And then in July 1834, Coleridge died, the fifty-years' 
 friend, and the shock was more than Charles Lamb could 
 bear. " His great and dear spirit haunts me," he 
 wrote ; and in the midst of talk with friends, he would 
 stop : " Coleridge is dead ! " he would say : " Coleridge 
 is dead ! " 
 
 One day in December, walking by himself on the 
 London road, he stumbled over a stone, and fell. His 
 face was sHghtly cut, and in a few days, erysipelas 
 set in. He sank so rapidly that when TaKourd and 
 Crabb Robinson arrived, he did not recognise them. 
 And, when he was dying, Mary could not even be told ; 
 she did not comprehend. 
 
 They buried him in Edmonton Churchyard, in a spot 
 which he had himself pointed out to Mary, in one of 
 their last Httle walks together. And she ? He had 
 left all his savings, £2000, in trust for Mary; to go 
 afterwards to Emma Isola, Moxon's wife. With this, 
 and the India House pension, Mary was comfortably 
 provided for. Afterwards, before she left Edmonton, she 
 used to make her Httle evening walk to Charles's grave. 
 In charge of a nurse, carefully looked after by the Moxons, 
 with Charles's old book-case full of his beloved " ragged 
 
84 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 veterans " in her parlour, Mary lived on in a house in 
 Alpha Road, St. John's Wood, tiU 1847. 
 
 Brother and sister were buried in the same grave. 
 The Mighty Debt was paid. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 ^'elia" 
 
 Chables Lamb is not one of the Titans of our literature, 
 though he has been called the most universally beloved 
 of English writers. He takes his place in Hterature as 
 an essa3dst — ^the writer of a single volume of incom- 
 parable essays, collected from the numbers of a brilUant 
 and short-lived London magazine.^ From his early 
 childhood, the works of the great English poets and 
 prose-writers had been his teachers, his companions, 
 his playmates. Verbal expression of his own thoughts 
 and feelings had been to a considerable extent Hmited by 
 an " eloquent stammer " ; and the same fate that had 
 surrounded him with good old English books had also 
 very early put the pen into his own hand. / He practised 
 various literary forms before he found his own/ But his 
 poetry, the young sonnets and blank verse, the pro- 
 logues and epilogues written for other men's plays, the 
 verses written for other people's children, the later 
 album- verses, and poems of occasion, «.do not, with 
 all their charm of feeling and ingenuity of rhyme and 
 metrical handling, often rise above the level of pleasant, 
 tuneful mediocrity. There is genius in the aching in- 
 tensity of the " Old Famihar Faces " ; there is the 
 swing and throb of human passion in the " Gipsy's 
 Malison " ; and there is a certain exquisitejiess in those 
 formal little elegiac verses, " Hester." /But, with a 
 few exceptions, it is not in his poetry that we recognise 
 
" ELIA '' 85 
 
 the poet in Charles Lamb. ^ He early tried his hand 
 at the dramatic form ; but John Woodvil, his old 
 English tragedy, and Mr. H — , his more modem 
 farce, are both, asLdrama, to be counted is^iluve^ The 
 
 Vone was refused, and the other hissed ; and, if they are 
 read to-day in his collected works, it is only because 
 
 xAhey were written by ,tiie«»mi«i-who afterwards wrote 
 the. Essays of Elicj/ His Rosamund Gray, the boyish 
 miniature-romance, full of unfinished and disconnected 
 beauties of thought and feeling, is, apart from his own 
 life-story, to be read now only as an early exercise of his 
 prose style. The charming" children's work," under- 
 taken partly for much-needed money, partly for as 
 necessary literary companionship, gave him some present 
 popularity, and enriched our literature with the prose 
 
 ^ Tales from Shakespeare; but even these would not^in them- 
 selves have ranked him with original writers of distinc- 
 tion. His first appearance in the field of critical hterature 
 was in his volume of Specimens of the English Dramatic 
 Poets, published in 1808, when he was thirty-three; 
 but his further and stronger work in this same field is 
 to be found in those separate papers, contributed from 
 time to time, after that date, to the various periodicals 
 of his day. It was in the Reflector, edited by his friend 
 Leigh Hunt, to which Lamb contributed so much 
 through the year 1811, that he wrote on the tragedies 
 of Shakespeare and on the genius and character of 
 Hogarth. And, as years went on, it was always in 
 such contributed papers of the essay- type, more or less 
 fugitive, more or less characteristically valuable, that 
 he expressed himseK. They appeared in the Champion^ 
 the Examiner, the Gentleman's Magazine, the New 
 Monthly Magazine, Hone's Every-Day Book, the English- 
 man's Magazine, and, in his last years, the Athenceum, 
 Some literary position Lamb had gained when OUier 
 published his collected works in 1818 ; but it was not 
 
S6 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 till 1820,/when he was forty>five, and was *' teased " 
 into contributing to the newly-started London Magazine, 
 that he found opportunity and scope to practise his 
 own Hterary form, and to earn for himself, during the 
 five years of ffiat magazine's hfetime, his ow n pecuhar 
 niighe in our literature. 
 
 The M&sa^^^.. MUa contain most of the best of 
 all. His best poetry will be found in their prose ; his 
 most searching and subtle criticism ; " situations " so 
 pathetic and so ludicrous that they bring tears and 
 laughter without the help of any stage or curtain ; 
 '' miniature romances " wrapped in the incidents of 
 humdrum daily hfe/" The £uips^and puns of Eha, his 
 bright nuggets of epigram, his sugary English humour, 
 and, above all, his ineffable tenderness and charity, 
 make his essays unlike any others ; not comparable ; 
 not to be held up and measured by ordinary literary 
 rules, by other men's genius, or scholarship, or ability. 
 Their cha^Pfigb-^JSLd-Jragrance, their intrinsic value in 
 /our written language, are to be summed up in their own 
 
 '^ simple title : they are the Essays of Elia. 
 
 What is it — what blend of Hterary quaHties — that 
 made Eha so beloved among English writers ? What is it 
 that made Southey say of him, " His memory will retain 
 its fragrance as long as the best spice that ever was 
 expended on one of the Pharaohs .' ' ? Is it that the 
 quaHties beloved in EUa are not only Hterary ; that 
 those who read him may always see, through Jimpid 
 depth&r-^fche human nature below the written words ? , 
 
 » It was a nature that had its Hmitations. The boy 
 had said good-bye to scholarship when he put off the 
 long blue coat and yellow stockings. The Oxford of 
 his inteUect was Oxford in the vacation, where he could 
 finger a foHo in the Bodleian, or stand entranced before 
 " spits that have cooked for Chaucer." *' The Adventures 
 of Ulysses " were " done " (" I would not mislead you ! ") 
 
" ELIA " 87 
 
 from Chapman's translation. Manning himself had 
 never been able to carry him further than the first 
 proposition in EucHd. I He cared nothing for poHtics 
 or parties, and never remembered what ministry was 
 in power. The death of the Princess Charlotte and 
 the infant Hope of England was chronicled by him as 
 a hohday for the clerks of the East India House. The 
 very tja^ught o^ -QiHa a, even when Manning went there, 
 ' ' strains the imagination and makes it ache. ' ' Australia , 
 even when Barron Field went there, was " Thiefland." 
 In a spirit of " antagonising " — always trying to bring 
 things neglected into line with things respected — he 
 sometimes ended by underrating the overrated. 
 " Cassock prejudices " summed up for him a great deal 
 that was scarcely tolerable by a nature so cathohc in 
 its nonconformities. For the Unitarian in Charles 
 Lamb had long since become the " One Goddite " ; 
 though he had never ceased to look for " silent Scripture " 
 in all wisdom, and spoke of Christ as having '' put on 
 the semblance of Man." And the boy who, in his 
 hour of tribulation, had found comfort in the Unitarian 
 chapel at Hackney, was now nearer to Deity when he 
 found himself standing alone inside an empty parish 
 church. 
 
 The very literary form that Charles Lamb had chosen, 
 the few vivid pages — effort of the moment — ^thrown off 
 for circulation in a busy world, is.characteristic of the 
 plan's life and nature. For he was ''jaJUbi^XOe in crowds," 
 and the thoughts that passed through his brain threaded 
 their way as did the human beings on the crowded pave- 
 ments of his London. By circumstance and nature he 
 ^ was unable to detach himself from the stress and hurry 
 of life's reahties, to engage in any one sustained hterary 
 effort. He thought and wrote very much as he walked : 
 " He looked no one in the face for more than a moment, 
 yet contrived to see everything as he went on." And 
 
88 CHARLES LAMB 
 
 he trusted those who read to understand him. He 
 V took mankind into his confidence, not afraid to bare his 
 mind and heart. His fervours and simpHcities, his httle 
 foibles and prejudices, would not be laughed at ; his 
 Umitations, his very frailties, would not be harshly 
 judged, by the people on the busy pavement — by man- 
 kind. He wrote his essays for them, in the same spirit 
 of trust and candour in which he wrote his familiar 
 letters — ^now, with his essays, most precious among 
 his works — to Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and Manning. 
 These men, and the people on the pavement, were they 
 not all his friends ? And, as he was not afraid of their 
 judgment, so also Charles Lamb w^ould never have 
 imagined it possible that his highest thoughts and 
 deepest feelings, those moods in which he indeed ap- 
 proaches very near to his great master, Shakespeare, 
 could be " caviare to the general." For it was " the 
 general " that Charles Lamb had always exalted, in 
 his heart of hearts. And " the general " has responded. 
 After all, is there not in our best hero-worship an 
 element of 4iuma^n tenderness, as well as admiration, 
 and reverence, and awe ? Perhaps this is why Wellington, 
 our hero of war, remains the " Iron Duke," while 
 Nelson, not wholly invulnerable, is a nation's hero and 
 a nation's darling. Would Prince Charlie have been 
 quite such a hero of romance, if he had not lost CuUoden 
 and wandered with a price upon his head ? And, among 
 the heroes of literature, the memory of " Sir Walter " 
 is cherished not only as the author of the Waverley 
 Novels, but as the man who raised a castle in the air, 
 and saw it crumble, and with his right hand " paid for 
 all." And is not Scotland's greatest poet, Robert Bums, 
 the most splendid and pathetic figure among her " poor 
 sons of a day " ? 
 
 And so with the memory of Elia. It is the young 
 city clerk, with the nervous stutter, the Titian head. 
 
'' ELIA " 89 
 
 the almost immaterial legs, and the unforgettable smile, 
 whose memory we cherish ; the Elia who took upon him- 
 \ .^elf, in a moment of agony, a life's duty, and performed 
 it; making his whole Hfe subservient to it ; sacrificing 
 much, loving greatly, failing sometimes, weeping often, 
 light-hearted and whimsical to the end^ This is the man 
 who has been called the most universally beloved of 
 English writers. This is the Elia whom Thackeray 
 has called " Saint Charles." 
 
CHRONOLOGY 
 
 1775. Charles Lamb, born Feb. 10, Crown Office Row. Temple. 
 
 1782-9. At Christ's Hospital. 
 
 1789-92. In service of South Sea House. 
 
 1792-1825. Clerk in East India House. 
 
 1795-7. At No. 7 Little Queen Street, Holborn. 
 
 1796. Contributed Sonnets to Coleridge's volume of Poems, 
 
 (Cottle.) 
 1797-1801. At No. 45 Chapel Street, Pentonville. 2nd ed. of 
 
 Coleridge's Poems, 1797. 
 1798. Rosamund Gray published. (Lee & Hurst.) 
 1801-9. At No. 16 Mitre Court Buildings, Temple. 
 1802. John Woodvil published. Contributions to Morning 
 
 Postf &c. 
 
 1806. Mr. H— produced at Drury Lane. 
 
 1807. Tales from SJiakespeare and Mrs. Leicester's School published. 
 
 1808. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets and Adventures of 
 Ulysses published. 
 
 1809-17. At No. 4 Inner Temple Lane. Poetry for Children 
 
 published. 
 1811. Prince Dorics and Beauty and the Beast published. 
 
 Contributions to The Reflector. 
 1817-23. At No. 20 Russell Street, Covent Garden. 
 1818. Collected JVorhs published. (2 vols.. Oilier.) 
 1820-5. Essays of Elia contributed to the London Magazine. 
 1823-6. At Colebrook Cottage, Colebrook Row, Islington. 
 
 (Afterwards called "Elia.") Collected Essays of Elia 
 
 published by Taylor and Hessey. 
 1825. Retired from East India House. 
 
CHRONOLOGY 91 
 
 1826-32. At Enfield (in lodgings, house, and lodgings again: 
 f The " gambogey-coloured house " was " the Manse/^ Enfield 
 Chase, afterwards called *' The Poplars.^ Contributed to 
 Hone's E very-Day Book, &c. 
 
 1830. Album Verses published. (Moxon.) 
 
 1831. Satan in Search of a Wife ^^nhlished. (Moxon.) 
 
 1832. At Bay Cottage, Edmonton. (Afterwards ''Lamb 
 Cottage.") 
 
 1833. Last Essays of Elia published. (Moxon.) 
 
 1834. Charles Lamb died, Dec. 27. Buried in Edmonton 
 Churchyard. 
 
 REFERENCE BOOKS 
 
 Letters of Charles Lamb, with Sketch of Life, by Thomas Noon 
 
 Talfourd. 1837. 
 Final Memorials, by Talfourd, 1848. Re-edited by W. C. Hazlitt, 
 
 1886. 
 Memoir of Charles Lamb, by B. W. Procter (Barry Cornwall), 
 
 with portraits. 1866. 
 Mary and Charles Lamb, by W. C. Hazlitt. 1874. 
 Charles Lamb (Men of Letters series), by Canon Ainger. 1888. 
 Letters of Charles Lamb, 2 vols., edited by Ainger. 1888 
 
 (Macmillan). 
 
 Complete Worhs of Charles Lamb, edited by Ainger. 1883-8 
 
 (Macmillan). 
 In the Footsteps of Charles Lamb, by B. E. Martin, 1891. 
 
 (Containing valuable bibliography by E. D. North, and 
 
 Illustrations of Houses.) 
 
INDEX 
 
 ABBE DE Lisle, 51 
 
 Adventures of Ulysses, 57, 86 
 
 Ainger, Canon, 43 (note), 51, 57, 72 
 
 Albion, the, newspaper, 47 
 
 Album Verses, 81 
 
 Alfoxden, 38 
 
 Alice W— . See Simmons, Ann 
 
 Allsop, Thomas, 71 
 
 All Souls' College, Oxford, 45 
 
 Alpha Road, St. John's Wood, 84 
 
 Alsager, T., 60 
 
 Amicus Redivivus (essay), 71 
 
 Annual Anthology, the, 43 
 
 AthenoBum, the, 85 
 
 Ayrton, William, 60 
 
 Barker's, in Covent Garden, 73 
 
 Barnes, Thomas, 60 
 
 Barton, Bernard, 65, 70 
 
 Bartrum, Maria, 43 (note) 
 
 Bartrura, Mr., 42, 43, 69 
 
 Bay Cottage, Edmonton, 82 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, 37, 73 
 
 *' Beauty and the Beast," 62 
 
 Bethlehem Hospital, 21, 29 
 
 Bird, William, 9-10 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 65, 81 
 
 Blake, William, 56 
 
 " Blakesmoor in Hertfordshire " 
 
 (essay), 16, 66, 73 
 Blakesware House, 6, 14-7, 22-3, 41 
 Blenheim, the pictures at, 61 
 *' Blenheims," 42 
 Blue-coat School, the. See Christ's 
 
 Hospital 
 Bodleian, the, 46 
 Bow Street, 63-4 
 Bowles's sonnets, 21, 37 
 Boyer, the Rev. James, 11, 12 
 British Museum, the, 80 
 *' Bull and Mouth" tavern, the, 37 
 Burney, Captain (afterwards Admiral), 
 
 60 
 Burney, Martin, 60 
 Burney, Mrs., 60 
 
 *' Caleb Williams," 46 
 
 Cambridge, 46, 64, 69 
 
 *' Captain Starkey," 10 (note) 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 65 
 
 Cary, the Rev. H. F., 65, 83 
 
 Chalk Farm, 65 
 
 Champion, the, 85 
 
 Chapel Street, Pentonville, 32, 35, 41, 
 
 44 
 Chitty, the Special Pleader, 62-3 
 Christ's Hospital, 9-14 
 — the essay on, 11 (note), 66 
 Clairmont, the widow, 46, 56 ; see also 
 
 Mrs. Godwin 
 Clari, the Maid of Milan, 64 
 Clarksons, the, 49 
 Colburn, the publisher, 80 
 Colebrook Cottage, Islington, 70-3, 78 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 38-9 
 Coleridge, Sara (Mrs.), 27 and note, 
 
 38,39 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 12, 13, 21, 
 
 26 and note, 27-31, 83, 36, 37-40, 42, 
 
 43, 44-5, 46, 48, 61, 62, 79, 83, 88 
 "Confessions of a Drunkard," 62, 72 
 Cottle, the publisher, 24 
 Coulson, William, 43 (note) 
 Covent Garden, 63, 64, 73 
 Cowper, 37 
 Crown Office Row, Temple, 5-9, 10, 14, 
 
 18, 19 
 Cunningham, Allan, 65 
 
 Dalston, 64 
 
 " Dash," 77 
 
 David Copperfield, 62 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 65 
 
 " Dissertation on Roast Pig," 66 
 
 "Dream-Children," 17, 66, 68-9 
 
 Drury Lane, 10, 22, 46-7, 64 
 
 Dyer, George, 13, 46, 70-1, 83 
 
 East India House, 21, 35, 37, 44, 59, 
 63, 64, 65, 71, 73, 75, 76, 77, 83, 87 
 
 Edinburgh Review, the, 48 
 
 Edmonton, 82, 83 
 
 "Ella," 65, 84-9; see also "Essays of 
 Elia " 
 
 Enfield, 77, 78, 82 
 
 Englishman's Magazine, the, 85 
 
 Enquiries into the Effects of Fermented 
 Liquors, 62 
 
 Essays of Elia, 65, 71, 85, 86 
 
 Evans, Mr. , of the India House, 62 
 
 Examiner, the, 85 
 
 Excursion, the, 62, 72 
 
INPEX 
 
 93 
 
 Fetter Lane, 9 
 Field, Barron, 61, 87 
 Field, Elizabeth. See Mrs. Iamb 
 Field, Mrs., 14, 22, 35, 41, 68 
 Field, the Rev. Matthew, 13 
 Fricker, Sara, 21 ; see also Mrs. Cole- 
 ridge 
 
 Garrick, David, 6 
 Gem, the, 80-1 
 
 Gentleman's Magazine, the, 85 
 *' Gipsy's Malison," the, 81, 84 
 Gladmans, the, 14 
 Godwin, Mrs. — 
 
 (1) Maiy WoUstonecraft, 46 
 
 (2) The widow Clairmont, 46, 56, 60 
 Godwin, William, 46. 60 
 
 " Godwin's bookseller," 54, 56, 62 
 Gray, the poet, 70 
 Great Russell Street, 63 
 Gutch, Matthew, 45, 47 
 
 Hackney, 32, 87 
 
 Hare Court, Temple, 58-9 
 
 "Harmony in Unlikeness," 77 
 
 Hastings, 64 
 
 Hazlitt, William, 57, 61, 65, 67 
 
 Hazlitts, the, 59, 60; see also Miss 
 
 Stoddart 
 Hertfordshire, 14-7, 22, 41 
 •' Hester," 84 ; see also Hester Savory 
 Hogarth prints, 59, 63 
 " Home, Sweet Home," 64 
 Hone's Eoery-Day Book, 80, 85 
 Hood, Thomas, 65, 71, 79 
 Hoxton Asylum, 23, 24, 53, 58 
 Hunt, Leigh, 60, 85 
 Hurst, the publisher, 80 
 
 "Imperfect Sympathies," 66 
 
 "In Praise of Chimney-sweeps," 13 
 
 (note) 
 Inner Temple Lane, 5, 58, 62-3 
 Isola, Agostino, 70 
 Isola, Charles, 70 
 Isola, Emma, 69, 70, 77-83 
 
 John Woodvil, 46, 48, 85 
 
 Kelly, Fanny, 60 
 Kemble, John, 46 
 
 Lamb, Charles, birth and parentage, 
 5-9 ; at the Blue-coat School, 9-14 ; 
 at the South Sea House, 14 ; attach- 
 ment to Ann Simmons, 14-17, 22-5 ; 
 sonnets, in Coleridge's Poems, 17, 
 24-5, 26, 33-4; at the East India 
 House, 18, 21; in Little Queen 
 Street, 19. ; friendship with Coleridge, 
 21-5 ; in Hoxton Asylum, 23-4 ; his 
 mother's death, 25-33 ; at Penton- 
 ville, 32, 35, 41 ; his Unitarianism, 
 32, 87 ; other poems by, 35, 37, 38-40 ; 
 Rosamund Gray, 38-44 ; blank verse 
 
 jvith Lloyd, '41.'; * i/lv(ry ; aoihiciled 
 
 • with* "liim, 44 ; at Southampton 
 Buildings, 45 ; visited Oxford and 
 Cambridge, 45-6 ; at Mitre Court 
 Buildings, 47-8; visit to the Lakes, 
 49 ; drinking habits, 49-51 ; lines to 
 *' Hester," 52 ; books written with 
 Mary, 54-60 ; visits to Winterslow, 
 59, 61 ; other prose writings, 62 ; at 
 Great Russell Street and Dalston, 63- 
 64 ; visit to Paris, 64 ; Essays ofJElia, 
 65-7, 71; and Emma Isola, 69, 70, 
 77 - 83 ; at Colebrook Cottage, 
 Islington, 70-3 ; retirement from 
 India House, 74-6; later life and 
 work, 76-7, 80-1 ; death, 83-4 ; place 
 in literature, 84 9; his Letters, 22, 
 88 
 
 Lamb, Elizabeth (Charles's mother), 
 5-10, 18-9, 23-33 
 
 Lamb, Henrietta ("Aunt Hetty"), 5, 
 7, 10, 12, 19, 20, 36 
 
 Lamb, John (Charles's father), 5-10, 
 18-9, 26 30, 44 
 
 Lamb, John (Charles's brother), 5-9, 
 17, 19, 20, 28-30, 66-8 
 
 Lamb, Mary Anne (Charles's sister), 
 5-10, 14-6, 19-20, 23-33, 42, 44-8, 53, 
 55, 58, 63-4, 70-3, 76-80, 82, 84 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 65, 79 
 
 Last Essays of Elia, 81 
 
 Le Grice, Charles, 13 
 
 Le Grice, Samuel, 13, 28 
 
 "Letter of Elia to Robert Southey, 
 Esq.," 72 
 
 Little Queen Street, Holborn, 19 
 
 Lloyd, Charles, 36-41, 46 
 
 London Magazine, the, 63-9, 71-3, 80, 
 86 
 
 Longman, the publisher, 80 
 
 "Lovel" in the Essays of Elia, 6-7 
 
 Mackery End, 14, 66 
 " Mahometan, The Young," 14-6, 57 
 Mahometanism Explained, 15 
 Manning, Thomas, 46, 49, 51, 54, 58, 
 
 75, 87, 88 
 Massinger, 34, 37 
 
 Milton, portrait of, 68, 82 (and note) 
 Mitre Court Buildings, 47, 48 
 Montagu, Basil, 61, 62, 74 
 Morning Chronicle, the, 25, 47 
 Morning Post, the, 44, 47, 48 
 Moion, Edward, 79-83 
 Moxon, Mrs. See Emma Isola 
 Mr. H~, 55, 85 
 
 " Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," 66 
 Mrs. Leicester's School, 14, 57 
 Mulready, 56 
 " My First Play " 22, 66 
 "My Relations," 66, 67 
 
 Nether Stowey, 35, 38 
 
 Newgate Street, 11, 21 
 
 I^ew Monthly Magazine, the, 80, 85 
 
94 
 
 INDEX 
 
 New :%iv«i, the, 12, 70-1 ' 
 Norris, Mrs, (l), 28 ; (2), 4S (note) 
 Norris, Randal, 12, 26 (and note), 28 
 Norrises, the, CO 
 
 "Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," 
 
 the, 6, 8, 66 
 " Old China," 66, 72 
 " Old Familiar Faces," the, 40, 84 
 Oilier, Charles, 85 
 Oxford, 45, 61 
 " Oxford in the Vacation," 61, 66 
 
 Pamphleteer, the, 62 
 Paris, 64, 82 
 Paris, Mrs., 69, 70 
 Payne, Howard, 64 
 *' Petty Venice," 71 
 Pierson, Miss Susannah, 19 
 Plumers, of Hertfordshire, the, 6, 15 
 Poems by Coleridge and Lamb, 17, 24- 
 
 25, 26, 33-4 
 Poetry for Children, 59 
 " Popular Fallacies," 80 
 Prince Dorus, 61-2 
 Procter, B. W. (Barry Cornwall), 6 
 
 (note), 50, 53, 61, 65, 71, 79 
 Procter, Mrs., 74 
 " Progress of Infidelity," the, 72 
 Prologue to Coleridge's Remorse, 62 
 
 QUANTOOK Hills, the, 39 
 Quarterly Review, the, 62, 72 
 
 ** Red Lion," the, 83 
 Reflector, the, 61, 85 
 Hickman, Thomas Clio, 60-1 
 Robinson, H. Crabb, 61, 65, 83 
 Rogers, Samuel, 81 
 Rosamund Gray, 41, 62, 85 
 
 Salt, Samuel, 5-9, 11, 14, 18-9 
 ** Salutation and Cat," the, 21, 35, 37 
 SOitan in Search of a Wife, 81 
 Savory, Hester, 51-2 
 Scott, John, 65 
 Siddons, Mrs., 6, 21-2, 24-5 
 Simmons, Ann, 17, 23-5, 42, 43 (and 
 note), 68-9 
 
 ilkepper, Anne. See Mrs. Procter 
 Skiddaw, 49 
 
 South Sea House, the, 14, 17, 66 
 Southampton Buildings, Chancery 
 
 Lane, 45, 47 
 Southey, Robert, 37, 38, 43, 44, 46, 71, 
 
 72 
 Specimens of Dramatic Poetry, 57, 85 
 St. Andrew's, Holborn, 32, 44, 58 
 Stoddart, Miss, 48, 53, 57 ; see also 
 
 Mrs. Hazlitt 
 " Superannuated Man," the, 75 
 '• Swan and Two Necks," the, 56 
 
 Tales from Shakespeare, the, 54, 56, 57, 
 
 85 
 Talfourd, Thos. Noon, 62-3, 67, 71, 82, 
 
 83 
 Talma, 64 
 
 Taylor and Hessey, Messrs., 65, 71 
 Temple, the, 5-9, 12, 13, 14, 47, 57, 
 
 60-3 
 Theses Qaaedam Theologicae, 44 
 Tim£s, the, 25, 60 
 Tower of London, the, 12 
 ** Traddles," 62 
 True Briton, the, 25 
 Tuthill, Dr., 75 
 Tween, Mrs., 43 (note) 
 " Two Races of Men," the, 66 
 
 Unitarianism, 32, 87 
 
 Wainewright, T. a, 65 
 
 Walden, Mr. and Mrs., 82 
 
 Ware, in Hertfordshire, 6 
 
 " Weathercock, Janus." See T. G. 
 
 Wainewright 
 Wedgwoods, the, 40 
 White, James, 18 
 
 Widford, in Hertfordshire, 6, 17, 22, 41 
 Will's Goflfee House, 63 
 Winterslow, 59, 61 
 WoUstonecraft, Mary, 46 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 38, 39, 71 
 Wordsworth, William, 3«, 39, 44, 55, 
 
 56, 61, 63, eS, 70, 71, 76, 81-2, 88 
 Wordsworths, the, 43, 49 
 
 Yeates, Mr., 10 
 
 3/13 
 
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